I found this to be somewhat of a deep read, and the characters were not at all what I had expected. Maguire does a good job of bluring the lines between good and evil--that is, readers of the original Oz book always assumed the wicked witch of the west was evil, but maybe she was just misguided and misunderstood. The ending confused me, because the witch did not die under the exact circumstances that she did in L. Frank Baum's book, and there were a few other inconsistencies, such as the omission of the golden cap which commanded the winged monkeys. Perhaps Maguire did this on purpose, to show us how a story can be told very differently by all those involved. All in all, I liked this book and think i'd probably get more out of it when I read it a second time.