This neighbourhood has really gone downhill…

What if Dorothy went back to Oz? And what if she is actually the villain of the story?
This YA novel posits that Dorothy returned to Oz and took over. She might have started off benign, but once she had power in Oz, she became an absolute tyrant. Her insistence on the appearance of happiness has led to a brutal regime that destroys all that is not beautiful or happy-looking. The Scarecrow, the Lion and the TinMan are all her corrupt cronies and Ozma, the true ruler of Oz, has disappeared.
The story is told in first person by a teenager called Amy, who grew up in a trailer park in modern-day Kansas. She is transported to Oz by a tornado (of course) where she is recruited by the Resistance to help them defeat Dorothy. As another outworlder, they assume she will have the power to kill Dorothy. Amy isn’t so sure about her Chosen One status. She is a complex, sassy girl who questions everything and doesn’t just go along. Good and Evil are not too clear and we get to see Amy struggle with her place in this new world, where her allies have expectations of her that she is not sure she wants to live up to.
There are some interesting, complicated characters and good world-building that adds to the Oz lore without going too far astray. There are Good Witches and Bad Witches and they are sometimes on the same team. As a Dystopian YA novel (Dystopian Oz!) theres the usual threads of Free Will vs Conformity etc but there’s also some good stuff around the Flying Monkeys and medical experimentation, exploitation of natural resources, colonization. There’s an obligatory romantic sub-plot but its not particularly well-developed and I don’t think it needed to be. Amy herself acknowledged that she had too much going on to get distracted by romance, but that as a teenage girl, she had to have some interest in Boys.
I’ve read a few of the other L. Frank Baum Oz books, so I appreciated how the story played out in the world, while also seeing through what I assume was meant to be a plot twist pretty easily. The book ends on a cliff hanger and there are a few more in the series. I’m sure I’ll get to them eventually.