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Bad Wizard
In 1892, Oscar Zoroaster Diggs turned up in Topeka with a suitcase full of high quality emeralds. Instantly the richest man in Kansas, his winning smile and keen mind launched him into a meteoric political career. As Secretary of War under Teddy Roosevelt, Diggs oversees the construction of the ultimate tool for spreading democracy, a fleet of rigid airships.
Dorothy Gale, a reporter for the Kansas Ear, is the one person who knows the truth about Diggs. She met him ten years prior in the Emerald City, where he ruled as the Wizard. But how can she explain to her editor that Diggs intends to use his aerial navy to invade an island in the clouds ruled by witches? Stopping Diggs is going to take more than the power of the press. She’ll need the help of old friends, and maybe a Winged Monkey, as she pursues the Wizard across the wondrous and deadly Land of Oz.
Dorothy Gale, a reporter for the Kansas Ear, is the one person who knows the truth about Diggs. She met him ten years prior in the Emerald City, where he ruled as the Wizard. But how can she explain to her editor that Diggs intends to use his aerial navy to invade an island in the clouds ruled by witches? Stopping Diggs is going to take more than the power of the press. She’ll need the help of old friends, and maybe a Winged Monkey, as she pursues the Wizard across the wondrous and deadly Land of Oz.
- GenresFantasy
328 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2014
3 people are currently reading
152 people want to read
About the author
James Maxey
93 books188 followersI've been an avid reader since I first picked up a book. Luckily, I was within biking distance of three different libraries growing up. I was a skinny kid. If only I had maintained that link between biking and reading, I might be a skinny adult.
I'm also a writer. I wrote my first book as a kid, an adventure about pirates and ghosts. When I was a teenager, I used to write superhero adventures. Then I went to college and was steered toward writing "literature." It took me several years to shake that off, and today I write the sort of books I devoured by the shelf when I was sixteen, fast-paced fantasy, SF, and superhero adventures, which I use to explore deeper questions about life. My goal is to always be thought-provoking and always be fun.
I've had short stories in about a dozen anthologies and magazines. My novels to date are:
Nobody Gets the Girl
The Dragon Age trilogy
Bitterwood
Dragonforge
Dragonseed
Burn Baby Burn
The Dragon Apocalypse
Greatshadow (January 2012) -- A team of superpowered adventurers are recruited by the Church of the Book to extinguish the primal dragon of fire, Greatshadow.
Hush (July 2012) -- An effort to complete a quest for a fallen friend, the warrior woman Infidel stumbles onto a plot to kill Glorious, the primal dragon of the sun, and plunge the world into permanent cold and darkness, the elemental domain of the dragon Hush.
Witchbreaker (January 2013) -- A young witch named Sorrow has lost control of her magic after tapping into the spirit of Rott, the primal dragon of decay. Her desperate quest to save what remains of her humanity leads to an uneasy alliance with an amnesiatic warrior who might be the legendary champion of the church known as the Witchbreaker. But can there combined powers prevail when they trigger the wrath of Tempest, the primal dragon of storms?
I'm also a writer. I wrote my first book as a kid, an adventure about pirates and ghosts. When I was a teenager, I used to write superhero adventures. Then I went to college and was steered toward writing "literature." It took me several years to shake that off, and today I write the sort of books I devoured by the shelf when I was sixteen, fast-paced fantasy, SF, and superhero adventures, which I use to explore deeper questions about life. My goal is to always be thought-provoking and always be fun.
I've had short stories in about a dozen anthologies and magazines. My novels to date are:
Nobody Gets the Girl
The Dragon Age trilogy
Bitterwood
Dragonforge
Dragonseed
Burn Baby Burn
The Dragon Apocalypse
Greatshadow (January 2012) -- A team of superpowered adventurers are recruited by the Church of the Book to extinguish the primal dragon of fire, Greatshadow.
Hush (July 2012) -- An effort to complete a quest for a fallen friend, the warrior woman Infidel stumbles onto a plot to kill Glorious, the primal dragon of the sun, and plunge the world into permanent cold and darkness, the elemental domain of the dragon Hush.
Witchbreaker (January 2013) -- A young witch named Sorrow has lost control of her magic after tapping into the spirit of Rott, the primal dragon of decay. Her desperate quest to save what remains of her humanity leads to an uneasy alliance with an amnesiatic warrior who might be the legendary champion of the church known as the Witchbreaker. But can there combined powers prevail when they trigger the wrath of Tempest, the primal dragon of storms?
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 14, 2015
It's just as well that I didn't remember until I finished this book that I'd previously read the author's Nobody Gets the Girl, and heartily disliked it for its dark and cynical tone. That would have prevented me from reading this one, which wasn't like that to nearly the same extent, and which I enjoyed.
There are a few reimaginings of Oz around these days. Wicked (the show and the book) and the movie Oz the Great and Powerful spring immediately to mind, and there's also been an anthology of short stories. This one, although it includes characters from the second book (Princess Ozma, the witch Mombi and, by reference, Jack Pumpkinhead), basically starts from the first book of the long series, the one everyone knows because of the classic movie, and considers only it to be "canon".
About a decade after the events of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is working on a newspaper, trying to expose the Wizard, Oscar Diggs, who has risen to be US Secretary of War under President Teddy Roosevelt and is using his position, his personal wealth, and his flim-flam to assemble a force loyal directly to him which can invade Oz by zeppelin. (This gets the book referred to as "steampunk". Even though we see airships and a steam-powered exoskeleton, though, it doesn't have much of a steampunk feel to me.)
I liked the fact that two of the characters have completely incompatible world views. Esau, known as the Flying Monkey because he's a hairy man who performs an aerial act, is a devout Christian; Dorothy, disturbed and disillusioned by her youthful experiences, is a principled atheist. They manage to work together with a minimum of argument, united by their conviction that Diggs must be stopped from regaining power in Oz. That neither one is depicted as "right" while the other is "wrong" shows a restraint in the insertion of authorial personal philosophy that isn't, sadly, all that common.
Something I didn't like is that Dorothy's late fiance (who she once refers to, in an apparent continuity error, as having been her husband) is the exact male equivalent of a Woman in a Refrigerator: a character who exists only so that their death can motivate the protagonist, not as an actor in their own right. I see no reason why swapping the genders would make this trope OK, though doing it to a woman, that is, a member of a group often already deprotagonised, is worse.
Apart from a few words missing from their sentences and a couple that are misused ("enormity" for "enormousness" and "adverse" for "averse"), the editing is good, and it very nearly made my "well-edited" shelf.
Overall, apart from the Man in a Refrigerator, this was a well-motivated, well-plotted tribute to the Oz stories, and enjoyable as an old-style adventure quite apart from its literary origins.
There are a few reimaginings of Oz around these days. Wicked (the show and the book) and the movie Oz the Great and Powerful spring immediately to mind, and there's also been an anthology of short stories. This one, although it includes characters from the second book (Princess Ozma, the witch Mombi and, by reference, Jack Pumpkinhead), basically starts from the first book of the long series, the one everyone knows because of the classic movie, and considers only it to be "canon".
About a decade after the events of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is working on a newspaper, trying to expose the Wizard, Oscar Diggs, who has risen to be US Secretary of War under President Teddy Roosevelt and is using his position, his personal wealth, and his flim-flam to assemble a force loyal directly to him which can invade Oz by zeppelin. (This gets the book referred to as "steampunk". Even though we see airships and a steam-powered exoskeleton, though, it doesn't have much of a steampunk feel to me.)
I liked the fact that two of the characters have completely incompatible world views. Esau, known as the Flying Monkey because he's a hairy man who performs an aerial act, is a devout Christian; Dorothy, disturbed and disillusioned by her youthful experiences, is a principled atheist. They manage to work together with a minimum of argument, united by their conviction that Diggs must be stopped from regaining power in Oz. That neither one is depicted as "right" while the other is "wrong" shows a restraint in the insertion of authorial personal philosophy that isn't, sadly, all that common.
Something I didn't like is that Dorothy's late fiance (who she once refers to, in an apparent continuity error, as having been her husband) is the exact male equivalent of a Woman in a Refrigerator: a character who exists only so that their death can motivate the protagonist, not as an actor in their own right. I see no reason why swapping the genders would make this trope OK, though doing it to a woman, that is, a member of a group often already deprotagonised, is worse.
Apart from a few words missing from their sentences and a couple that are misused ("enormity" for "enormousness" and "adverse" for "averse"), the editing is good, and it very nearly made my "well-edited" shelf.
Overall, apart from the Man in a Refrigerator, this was a well-motivated, well-plotted tribute to the Oz stories, and enjoyable as an old-style adventure quite apart from its literary origins.
October 22, 2014
Bad Wizard is a sort of sequel/retelling of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, featuring some characters from the other Oz stories as well. Dorothy Gale is now a grown up young woman and working as a journalist for the Kansas Ear publication. She is on a mission to expose Oscar Diggs, better known as The Wizard of Oz, as he plans to take his army of airships to reclaim his throne in the Emerald City. Dorothy finds herself back in Oz once more accompanied by old friends and new in their fight to stop Diggs once and for all.
I enjoyed reading this book and I was already a fan of the Oz books, so you could say I know the lore and I'm not just familiar with the movie with Judy Garland. It serves as a nice little expansion on the universe. The theories about what Oz may represent spiritually were interesting, as well as the way magic worked in this reimagined world. It touches a little on some philosophical subjects too.
I suppose this was mainly a sequel only to first book in the Oz series, while ignoring the rest, since I know Dorothy definitely met characters like Ozma and Mombi before. You don't necessarily have to have read any of the Oz books, and know the universe to understand this one, but you might miss out on a few references. It might even make you want to read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for yourself.
Of the new characters, I really liked the family oriented Esau and the interesting and fun take on the "flying monkey." Clever.
Diggs was a really nasty villain. He lived up to his status and often wouldn't hesitate to kill anyone who tried to get in his way. He was not remorseful about it either. He might even be too extreme. Even hearing about his back story, I had a hard time sympathizing with him. He is much more powerful than he was before.
Dorothy is still likable, but has changed since she last left Oz. She struggles with her own identity and place in the world and has become more of a skeptic.
I found the resolution a little cartoony. Things start to get really crazy and out there, but it was a good read. I was entertained by this new take on the universe. I liked it more than Wicked even, but that was something totally different and you can't really compare the two.
I enjoyed reading this book and I was already a fan of the Oz books, so you could say I know the lore and I'm not just familiar with the movie with Judy Garland. It serves as a nice little expansion on the universe. The theories about what Oz may represent spiritually were interesting, as well as the way magic worked in this reimagined world. It touches a little on some philosophical subjects too.
I suppose this was mainly a sequel only to first book in the Oz series, while ignoring the rest, since I know Dorothy definitely met characters like Ozma and Mombi before. You don't necessarily have to have read any of the Oz books, and know the universe to understand this one, but you might miss out on a few references. It might even make you want to read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for yourself.
Of the new characters, I really liked the family oriented Esau and the interesting and fun take on the "flying monkey." Clever.
Diggs was a really nasty villain. He lived up to his status and often wouldn't hesitate to kill anyone who tried to get in his way. He was not remorseful about it either. He might even be too extreme. Even hearing about his back story, I had a hard time sympathizing with him. He is much more powerful than he was before.
Dorothy is still likable, but has changed since she last left Oz. She struggles with her own identity and place in the world and has become more of a skeptic.
I found the resolution a little cartoony. Things start to get really crazy and out there, but it was a good read. I was entertained by this new take on the universe. I liked it more than Wicked even, but that was something totally different and you can't really compare the two.
July 26, 2015
Absolutely delightful. Best Maxey book I've read yet (and I've almost all of them).
May 17, 2020
I received this book for free. I am voluntarily posting this review and all opinions expressed herein are my own.
This book takes place ten plus years after Dorothy has returned from Oz: Teddy Roosevelt is now president [putting this in the early 1900's]; Auntie Em and Uncle Henry have long since died; Dorothy is all grown-up and a newspaper reporter; and the "Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz" Oscar Diggs is the Secretary of War for President Roosevelt. There are many characters from the the Baum books who also make an appearance. A new character is Esau - "The Flying Monkey" - who is a hairy man who jumps from hot air balloons as an act but is actually quite an adept engineer and a very religious man. There are several discussions between the characters related to religion, magic and evil. I was very intrigued by this aspect of the story. The discussion related to what Oz actually may be or represents was most interesting - I liked that the author did not provide a definitive answer, leaving the reader [and the characters] to ponder the symbolism of it all. Overall, I really enjoyed revisiting Oz.
The narrator, Jason Burkhead, does various voices for all of the different characters. Overall, his narration is fine but he has an odd quirk while narrating - he pauses at odd times in a the middle of a sentence. It is not consistent, more haphazard, but he does it enough that I found it to be a bit distracting.
This book takes place ten plus years after Dorothy has returned from Oz: Teddy Roosevelt is now president [putting this in the early 1900's]; Auntie Em and Uncle Henry have long since died; Dorothy is all grown-up and a newspaper reporter; and the "Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz" Oscar Diggs is the Secretary of War for President Roosevelt. There are many characters from the the Baum books who also make an appearance. A new character is Esau - "The Flying Monkey" - who is a hairy man who jumps from hot air balloons as an act but is actually quite an adept engineer and a very religious man. There are several discussions between the characters related to religion, magic and evil. I was very intrigued by this aspect of the story. The discussion related to what Oz actually may be or represents was most interesting - I liked that the author did not provide a definitive answer, leaving the reader [and the characters] to ponder the symbolism of it all. Overall, I really enjoyed revisiting Oz.
The narrator, Jason Burkhead, does various voices for all of the different characters. Overall, his narration is fine but he has an odd quirk while narrating - he pauses at odd times in a the middle of a sentence. It is not consistent, more haphazard, but he does it enough that I found it to be a bit distracting.
November 16, 2022
Bad Wizard is essentially Wizard of Oz fan fiction. I’ve never read the books and have only seen the movie, so the darker portrayal of Oz took me by surprise. I did find the characters engaging, particularly Esau Bejano. I enjoyed his moral compass and the struggles he faces in his determination to do what is right. The uncommon Oz characters also grabbed my attention, and makes me want to read the original stories to learn more about them. The narrative seemed a little slow at times but overall I enjoyed the book.
May 4, 2020
Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I was a beta reader back in 2015 when this book was first written. At the time I was familiar with the Wizard of Oz movie but had only passing knowledge of the original book. The book draws it's lore mostly from the first two books but extrapolates from there with Maxey's imagination. I only note this to say that if you have not read the books - you get plenty of explanations and I did not have any trouble following along with the story. Having read the books, now I can appreciate even more the source material that Maxey drew from.
Ten years after Dorothy returned from Oz and her life has changed. She is no longer a little girl. She uncovers a plot by the Wizard to not only return to Oz, but to conquer it and take back the throne he once held.
We have elements of steampunk mixing with magic systems that Maxey has cleverly defined to raise real stakes. We see many familiar faces with new twists in their Happily Ever After and revelations about their origins that were previously unexplored. There is action, imagination, and some thought provoking questions. How do you choose between two evils? What is the role of religion and faith when confronted with real magic? What is home? Because it's a Maxey novel, he keeps the pace brisk while fleshing out his many characters. Answers aren't easy or readily apparent.
If you've wanted a bit more of a grown up version of the Wizard of Oz or have ever wanted to see a zeppelin take on a pack of flying monkeys escape to with the Bad Wizard. You won't be disappointed.
This is the first book I've listened to that was narrated by Jason Burkhead. He did a wonderful job with clear narration, bringing characters to life with unique voices. He was very easy to listen to and I would gladly listen to other titles of his in the future.
I was a beta reader back in 2015 when this book was first written. At the time I was familiar with the Wizard of Oz movie but had only passing knowledge of the original book. The book draws it's lore mostly from the first two books but extrapolates from there with Maxey's imagination. I only note this to say that if you have not read the books - you get plenty of explanations and I did not have any trouble following along with the story. Having read the books, now I can appreciate even more the source material that Maxey drew from.
Ten years after Dorothy returned from Oz and her life has changed. She is no longer a little girl. She uncovers a plot by the Wizard to not only return to Oz, but to conquer it and take back the throne he once held.
We have elements of steampunk mixing with magic systems that Maxey has cleverly defined to raise real stakes. We see many familiar faces with new twists in their Happily Ever After and revelations about their origins that were previously unexplored. There is action, imagination, and some thought provoking questions. How do you choose between two evils? What is the role of religion and faith when confronted with real magic? What is home? Because it's a Maxey novel, he keeps the pace brisk while fleshing out his many characters. Answers aren't easy or readily apparent.
If you've wanted a bit more of a grown up version of the Wizard of Oz or have ever wanted to see a zeppelin take on a pack of flying monkeys escape to with the Bad Wizard. You won't be disappointed.
This is the first book I've listened to that was narrated by Jason Burkhead. He did a wonderful job with clear narration, bringing characters to life with unique voices. He was very easy to listen to and I would gladly listen to other titles of his in the future.
March 23, 2016
I'm not a huge Oz fan, but I've seen the movie. That was plenty of background to enjoy this book. Some ten or fifteen years after Dorothy first visits Oz, she's back in Kansas, working as a reporter covering, among other things, the Wizard, known as Oscar Diggs. Little does she know, he's got a plot to get back to Oz and take over.
Maxey always has engaging characters and this book was no exception. Dorothy and Oscar were both fully realized with mixed motivations and biases. The second-string characters, including some favorites from the Oz I remember from childhood and new creations, like Esau "The Flying Monkey" and Cain, are appropriately developed and intriguing.
Speculative fiction can be an excellent playground for exploring morality and philosophy and Maxey does so here, without becoming pedantic or dry. I hope Maxey returns to this world for more books in the future.
Maxey always has engaging characters and this book was no exception. Dorothy and Oscar were both fully realized with mixed motivations and biases. The second-string characters, including some favorites from the Oz I remember from childhood and new creations, like Esau "The Flying Monkey" and Cain, are appropriately developed and intriguing.
Speculative fiction can be an excellent playground for exploring morality and philosophy and Maxey does so here, without becoming pedantic or dry. I hope Maxey returns to this world for more books in the future.
December 25, 2014
I won this on GoodReads.
Wow, little Dorothy Gale is all grown up and working as a reporter when she realized the Secretary of War is none other than her old nemesis Oscar Zoroaster Diggs (aka. the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz). In “Bad Wizard”, James Maxey takes us on a trek through Oz as Dorothy tries to protect it from Diggs taking over using technology from the USA. In the ten years since Dorothy and the Wizard left there have been some changes. This is as fun and imaginative as the origin stories. If you loved Oz, you need to read “Bad Wizard”.
Wow, little Dorothy Gale is all grown up and working as a reporter when she realized the Secretary of War is none other than her old nemesis Oscar Zoroaster Diggs (aka. the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz). In “Bad Wizard”, James Maxey takes us on a trek through Oz as Dorothy tries to protect it from Diggs taking over using technology from the USA. In the ten years since Dorothy and the Wizard left there have been some changes. This is as fun and imaginative as the origin stories. If you loved Oz, you need to read “Bad Wizard”.
May 10, 2015
Dorothy returns to Oz is a sort of steampunk revolution.
A good read, but the story felt rushed in some places. The overall idea was good, though, and well worth the time spent on it (not the money; it was free!)
A good read, but the story felt rushed in some places. The overall idea was good, though, and well worth the time spent on it (not the money; it was free!)
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews