“You go on ahead, then,” said the Lion. “We’ll find a future uncharted by any tiktok charm. We’ll make our luck as we go along. When I get back.”

       “Why?” asked Ilianora. “What are you doing now? Where are you going?”

       He wasn’t sure even what his answer would be; he waited to hear the words from his own mouth.

       “The cottage there.” They were passing a small stone hut with a roof of oakhair thatch. A kitchen fire was still burning in the chimney, and beyond, in the light, a field of wheat rustled like gold on water. “One of the maunts mentioned that an elderly couple lives there, and their sons have gone off to war. The rain will come soon, and the wind, and an army will trample this field by tomorrow. I have learned enough about prophecy to say that for sure: Its future is drenched in blood. Let me harvest wheat before the catastrophe. I’ve done some agricultural work in my time. I can bring in that crop for them. Better they should have something to sell to the mill when the battle is history and their sons are dead. Better that wheat should go for bread. No? No?”

       “Go, then,” said Ilianora. “If you must. Someone might as well chase the schoolchildren away from the lightning-wreathed hill.”

a book can be… a bridge? setting the stage? 

on the cover of the audiobook i listened to most of this book with, there is a bit of praise for maguire that said “a masterful storyteller with an uncanny flair for mixing political and personal.”

that remains true, and beyond the gelphie motivators, is likely why i finished this book on the first place. this world fascinates me, especially in the granular, and especially in the political. a masterful storyteller yes, but when the book feels like more of a bridge to a conclusion than an active story, where does that leave you? it leaves you with this, with brrr, with mr. wrong-place-wrong-time pinballing about oz and struggling to connect with any campaign, any person at all—- including me, the reader, until quite near the end.

this book retraces some things. a maguire protagonist with an intimate relationship to loneliness and failure, a distant relationship to intimacy, and an ambiguous and haunting origin. yackle, like nastoya, is another figure who wants to die and cannot, for whom living is a daily hurt. i found this book most compelling when we got further answers and insight and perspectives on the going’s on of the very first book in the wicked years. this series lives in elphaba’s shadow, in good and in ill. it is once again very interested in religion and fate and the role of character in history and narrative and there are some interesting ideas there — i think of the conversation on liir and candle’s daughter, on her belonging — but then again much of it retreads ground and meanders, scattering seeds.

it is good to see nor again. i am excited for her and liir’s reunion. maguire’s can really do an affecting reunion! i just hope the final book will be decisive and precise enough to make me say yeah, we needed this one