A Lion among Men (Wicked Years Series #3)

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ADVERTISING

Overview

"Maguire is full of storytelling brio...his OZ is meticulously drawn." —New York Times on Wicked

"In the much anticipated third volume of the Wicked Years, we return to Oz, seen now through the eyes of the Cowardly Lion.

While civil war looms in Oz, a tetchy oracle named Yackle prepares for death. Before her final hour, a figure known as Brrr—the Cowardly Lion—arrives searching for information about Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West. Abandoned as a cub, his path from infancy is no Yellow Brick Road. In the wake of laws that oppress talking Animals, he avoids a jail sentence by agreeing to serve as a lackey to the warmongering Emperor of Oz.

A Lion Among Men chronicles a battle of wits hastened by the Emerald City's approaching armies. Can those tarnished by infamy escape their sobriquets to claim their own histories, to live honorably within their own skins before they're skinned alive?

Gregory Maguire's new novel is written with the sympahty and power that have made his books contemporary classics.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

The entertaining third installment of bestseller Maguire's Wicked Years series, a revisionist chronicle of L. Frank Baum's classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, examines the tragically misunderstood life of the Cowardly Lion before and after his adventures with Dorothy and company. As all-out war looms between the Munchkinland guerrillas and the emperor of Oz's Emerald City soldiers, Brrr the lion, now working as an imperial spy, must somehow glean invaluable information from a crone named Yackle before she dies. But during his interrogation of the irritable oracle, Brrr, the proverbial loner and outsider, uncovers insights into his own mysterious past-and finally begins to understand what it feels like to belong. As usual, the author mixes some relatively weighty existential themes-the search for self, faith, redemption-into his whimsical story line. Newcomers to Maguire's Oz should probably begin with Wicked, the first entry in this darkly enchanting saga. 11-city author tour. (Oct. 14)

More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews

From The Critics

In this third entry in his "Wicked Years" series-following Wicked and Son of a Witch-Maguire (www.gregorymaguire.com) returns to Oz, this time homing in on Brrr, aka the Cowardly Lion. Though at times needlessly complex, the story ultimately both intrigues and entertains. Audie® Award winner John McDonough's (Grace Will Lead Me Home) performance is adequate, though Brrr's low growlings can be difficult to understand. Recommended for most fiction collections. [Audio clip available through www.harperaudio.com; the Morrow hc was recommended "for all fiction collections," LJ10/15/08.-Ed.]
—Lisa Anderson

The Barnes & Noble Review

It all began, to some degree, with Tom Stoppard.

In 1966, when Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead premiered, the type of radical literary revisionism that play embodied was just a nascent twinkle in the average postmodernist's eye. But Stoppard's recasting of two bit players from Hamlet as the leads in a new ?adventure? burst the dam holding back a flood of reimagined biographies of characters from canonical literature. (Curiously enough, 1966 also begat Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, a spin-off of Jane Eyre. There was certainly something in the air!)

Any such attempt to meddle in the imaginary universe of a classic work has to contend with twinned yet antithetical urges and imperatives. The author, if respectful, wants to honor the canonicity and continuity and tone of the original, while still offering his own unique spin and inventions, hopefully in the true spirit of the template.

Gregory Maguire achieved this masterfully in his justly celebrated novel Wicked (1995). He took a relatively undeveloped character, L. Frank Baum's Wicked Witch of the West from the Oz books, and built a Bildungsroman around her. Given a name, Elphaba Thropp, our Witch became a tragic character of almost Shakespearian dimensions, while the land and society of Baum's imagination was fleshed out with deep sophistication.

Maguire offered an Oz that was both a stage for political allegory and a weird landscape of spiritual questing. He returned to its terrain ten years later with Son of a Witch and now continues his exploration with A Lion Among Men, the third in the newly christened Wicked Years series.

Our focus this go-round is Brrr, the one and only Cowardly Lion. We've seen him glancingly in the prior installments, but now we get to plumb his depths. The real-time frame of the story is a mere 24 hours (a day some nine years onward from the close of Son) spent at the ?mauntery of Saint Glinda.? Brrr, a reluctant secret agent for the Emerald City under Emperor Shell (Elphaba's brother), has arrived to interview a mysterious ?maunt,? or nun, named Yackle, who might possess information as to the whereabouts of Elphaba's son Liir and his daughter, potential rivals to Shell. Yackle's price for cooperating is for Brrr to recount his life story, in flashback form.

It's a tale of high naive ambitions and glorious dreams betrayed by innate vices like sloth and indecision, and a fair amount of sheer bad luck and human malice. (Talking animals are second-class citizens in Oz.) As he did with Wicked's Elphaba, Maguire builds appealingly and daringly on Baum's original conception: Brrr emerges from the novel as a figure whose self-knowledge has only achingly accentuated his status as failure and misfit.

The impulse to continue or revise the literary creations of others had been around, of course, for a long time before Stoppard. No sooner was Dickens cooling in his grave than folks were trying to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood. And the realm of folktales has always lent itself to anonymous extensions and elaborations by many disparate minds.

Genre fiction in particular seems to encourage, by some element of its very nature, a writer's desire to create (and an audience's desire to read) alternate or extended scenarios for beloved fictional personages, adventures that elaborate or revise deep continuity. The Sherlockians led the way early on, by treating Doyle's stories about Holmes as pieces of a biography, new bits of which could be uncovered by ?scholarship.? Ludic masters like Philip Jose Farmer were soon constructing enormous edifices like the Wold Newton Family Tree, which omnivorously amalgamated such diverse heroes as Tarzan, Solomon Kane, Lew Archer, and Philip Marlowe. And what are superhero comics and franchise fiction like the hundreds of Star Trek books if not the ultimate many-handed literary beast?

Of course, somewhere along the line comes fan fiction, that much-derided wart on the body of ?real literature.? Yet internet expert Bill Tancer recently estimated that fan fiction constitutes a full third of all fiction-related material available on the Web, testifying to its allure and power.

So what distinguishes a book such as A Lion Among Men from any teen's Buffy-meets-Naruto maunderings? The same things that distinguish any good book of any stripe from its amateurish counterparts: depth and clarity of vision, excellence of prose, richness of theme, intricacy of characterization, shapeliness of plot. And while A Lion Among Men boasts all these virtues in greater-than-average abundance, I have to opine that it (and its immediate predecessor, Son of a Witch) don't pack quite the punch of Wicked and indeed offer some frustrations typical of less-creative fantasy series.

While many of the events of Brrr's past will be new and intriguing to the reader, his backstory acquires an overall Rashomon aura: it's just another angle on the events of the first two volumes. True, by novel's end, we've discovered the secret identity of Liir's long-missing half sister Nor, Yackle's own secrets, and more of the motivations of the mysterious prophecy engine known as The Clock of the Time Dragon. But the book seems stuck in a holding pattern, so far as the whole series' progress is concerned.

Moreover, when characters are calling dessert ?afters? or swanning about in Oscar Wilde fashion, an Anglophile element creeps into Maguire's Oz. Now, Baum's Oz was famously an all-American fairy tale, the first real one of its kind, full of demotic vigor and frontier zest. Losing that aspect is Maguire's sole betrayal of the original books.

Happily, his prose remains an elegant delight, full of striking aphorisms and aperçus and philosophical insights into life. The dialogue is always crisp and pointed and droll. Maguire's depiction of Oz approaches at times the bizarre dimensions and heft of China Miéville's New Crobuzon, especially in such elements as the prison of Southstairs. And he obviously knows the vast Oz mythos and alludes to many pieces of the14-book original -- watch for old favorite the Glass Cat in Lion -- as well as to the film, although he revises events and characters to his taste. The overall effect of his storytelling is a blend of the best of William Kotzwinkle, Walter Moers, Ray Bradbury, and Christopher Moore.

Maguire's achievement in the Wicked Years books ranks high, right up there with the similarly inspired milestones by Geoff Ryman in Was (1992) and Alan Moore in Lost Girls (2006). The new superstructure each man has erected on Baum's foundation shines like the Emerald City seen from the Yellow Brick Road. --Paul DiFilippo

Author of several acclaimed novels and story collections, including Fractal Paisleys, Little Doors, and Neutrino Drag, Paul DiFilippo was nominated for a Sturgeon Award, a Hugo Award, and a World Fantasy Award -- all in a single year. William Gibson has called his work "spooky, haunting, and hilarious." His reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Science Fiction Weekly, Asimov's Magazine, and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780060548926
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 10/14/2008
Pages: 336
Sales rank: 36,415
Lexile: 0830L (what's this?)
Series: Wicked Years Series, #3
Product dimensions: 5.80 (w) x 9.30 (h) x 1.10 (d)

Meet the Author

Gregory Maguire

Spinning fantastical tales for adults and children alike -- from the hit kids' series The Hamlet Chronicles to the decidedly more grown-up adventures played out in Wicked and Mirror, Mirror, Gregory Maguire has cast a potent literary spell on readers of all ages.

Biography

Raised in a family of writers (his father was a journalist and his stepmother a poet), Gregory Maguire grew up with a great love of books, especially fairy tales and fantasy fiction. He composed his own stories from an early age and released his first book for children, The Lightning Time, in 1978, just two years after graduating from the State University of New York at Albany.

Several other children's book followed, but major recognition eluded Maguire. Then, in 1995, he published his first adult novel. A bold, revisionist view of Frank L. Baum's classic Oz stories, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West places one of literature's most reviled characters at the center of a dark dystopian fantasy and raises provocative questions about the very nature of good and evil. Purists criticized Maguire for tampering with a beloved juvenile classic, but the book received generally good reviews (John Updike, writing in The New Yorker, proclaimed it "an amazing novel.") and the enthusiasm of readers catapulted it to the top of the bestseller charts. (Maguire's currency increased even further when the book was turned into the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Wicked in 2003.)

In the wake of his breakthrough novel, Maguire has made something of a specialty out of turning classic children's tales on their heads. He retold the legends of Cinderella and Snow White in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (1999) and Mirror, Mirror (2003); he raised the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge in Lost (2001); and, in 2005, he returned to Oz for Son of a Witch, the long-awaited sequel to Wicked. He has reviewed fantasy fiction for the Sunday New York Times Book Review and has contributed his own articles, essays, and stories to publications like Ploughshares, The Boston Review, the Christian Science Monitor, and The Horn Book Magazine.

In addition, Maguire has never lost his interest in -- or enthusiasm for -- children's literature. He is the author of The Hamlet Chronicles, a bestselling seven-book series of high-camp mystery-adventures with silly count-down titles like Seven Spiders Spinning and Three Rotten Eggs. He has taught at the Center for the Study of Children's Literature at Simmons College and is a founding member of Children's Literature New England (CLNE), a nonprofit organization that focuses attention on the significance of literature in the lives of children.

Good To Know

In our interview, Maguire shared some fun facts with us about his life:

"While I pride myself on trying to be creative in all areas of my life, I have occasionally gone overboard, like the time I decided to bring to a party a salad that I constructed, on a huge rattan platter, to look like a miniature scale model of the Gardens of Babylon. I built terraces with chunks of Monterey jack, had a forest of broccoli florets and a lagoon of Seven Seas salad dressing spooned into a half a honeydew melon. I made reed patches out of scallion tips and walkways out of sesame seeds lined with raisin borders. Driving to the party, I had to brake to avoid a taxi, and by the time the police flagged me down for poor driving skills I was nearly weeping. ‘But Officer, I have a quickly decomposing Hanging Gardens of Babylon to deliver....' Everything had slopped and fallen over and it looked like a tray of vegetable garbage."

"My first job was scooping ice cream at Friendly's in Albany, New York. I hated the work, most of my colleagues, and the uniform, and I more or less lost my taste for ice cream permanently."

"If I hadn't been a writer, I would have tried to be one of the following: An artist (watercolors), a singer/songwriter like Paul Simon (taller but not very much more), an architect (domestic), a teacher. Actually, in one way or another I have done all of the above, but learned pretty quickly that my skills needed more honing for me to charge for my services, and I'd always rather write fiction than hone skills."

"I steal a bit from one of my favorite writers to say, simply, that I enjoy, most of all, old friends and new places. I love to travel. Having small children at home now impedes my efforts a great deal, but I have managed in my time to get to Asia, Africa, most of Europe, and Central America. My wish list of places not yet visited includes India, Denmark, Brazil, and New Zealand, and my wish for friends not yet made includes, in a sense, readers who are about to discover my work, either now or even when I'm no longer among the living. In a sense, in anticipation, I value those friends in a special way."

1. Hometown:
  
  Boston, Massachusetts
1. Date of Birth:
  
  June 9, 1954
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Albany, New York
1. Education:
  
  B.A., SUNY at Albany, 1976; M.A., Simmons College, 1978; Ph.D., Tufts University, 1990
2. Website:
  
  http://www.gregorymaguire.com

Read an Excerpt

A Lion Among Men

Chapter One

The time came for her to die, and she would not die; so perhaps she might waste away, they thought, and she did waste, but not away; and the time came for her to receive final absolution, so they set candles upon her clavicle, but this she would not allow. She blasphemed with gusto and she knocked the scented oils across the shroud they'd readied on a trestle nearby.

"God love her," they said, in bitter, unconvincing voices...or perhaps they meant May the Unnamed God love her, our unrepentant sister Yackle, for we certainly can't.

"Sink me in the crypt," she said, speaking directly to them for the first time in years. "You're too young to know; that's how they used to do it. When the time came for an elder to go and she wouldn't, they settled her down in the ossuary so she could chummy up to the bones. Supplied her with a couple of candles and a bottle of wine. Let her get used to the notion. They came back a year later to sweep up the leavings."

"Mercy," said whoever was nearby to hear.

"I insist," she replied. "Check with Sister Scholastica and she'll bear me out.""She's raving mad," said someone else, chocolately. Yackle approved of chocolate, and indeed, everything edible. Since Yackle's eyesight had gone out for good a decade earlier, she identified individuals by the degree and idiosyncracy of their halitosis.

"She's always been raving mad," said a third observer, Vinegarish Almonds. "Isn't that rather sweet?"

Yackle reached for something to throw, and all she could find was her other hand, which wouldn't detach.

"She's doing sign language." "The poor, deluded dovelette.""Clinging to life so...whatever for?" "Perhaps it isn't her time."

"It is," said Yackle, "it is, I keep telling you. Won't you fiends let me die? I want to go to hell in a handbasket. Put me out of my misery and into the Afterlife where I can do some real damage, damn it."

"She's not herself," said someone.

"She was never reliably herself, to hear tell," said another.

The bedsheets caught fire spontaneously. Yackle found she was rather enjoying this, but it helped neither her reputation nor her rescue that the only liquid nearby with which to douse the flames was cognac.

Still, Yackle was not to be dissuaded. "Isn't there a Superior in the House?" she asked. "Someone who can lay down the law?"

"The Superior Maunt died a decade ago," they replied. "We work by consensus now. We've noted your request to be interred alive. We'll put it on the agenda and take it up next week at Council."

"She'll burn the House down, and us with it," muttered a novice, sometime later. Yackle could tell that the innocent speaker was talking to herself, to stoke her courage.

"Come here, my duckie," said Yackle, grasping. "I smell a little peppermint girl nearby, and no garlicky matron hovering. Are you the sentry? On our own, are we? Come, sit nearer. Surely there is still a Sister Apothecaire in residence? With her cabinets of nostrums and beckums, tonics and tablets? She must possess a sealed jar, it would be dark blue glass, about yea-high, pasted over with a label picturing three sets of crossed tibias. Couldn't you find this and pour me out a fatal little decoction?"

"Not a spoonful of it, I en't the grace to do it," said Peppermint Girl. "Let go a me, you harpy. Let go or...or I'll bite you!"

Out of charity to the young, Yackle let go. It would do the poor girl no good to take a bite of old Yackle. The antidote en't been invented yet, and so on.

Hours and days pass at elastic rhythms for the blind. Whether the pattern of her naps and wakings followed the ordinary interruptions of daylight by nighttime, Yackle couldn't tell. But someone she recognized as Broccoli Breath eventually informed her that the sorority had decided to bow to Yackle's final wish. They would install her in the crypt among the remains of women long dead. She could approach bodily corruption at whatever speed appealed to her. Three candles, and as to nourishment, red or white?

"A beaker of gasoline and a match as a chaser," said Yackle, but she was indulging in a joke; she was that pleased. She nominated a saucy persimmon flaucande and a beeswax candle scented with limeberries...for the aroma, not for the light. She was beyond light now.

"Good voyage, Eldest Soul," they sang to her as they carried her down the stairs. Though she weighed no more than sugarbrittle she was awkward to move; she couldn't govern her own arms or legs. As if motivated by a spite independent of her own, her limbs would keep ratcheting out to jab into doorjambs. The procession lacked a fitting dignity.

"Don't come down for at least a year," she sang out, giddy as a lambkin. "Make that two. I might be old as sin itself, but once I start rotting it won't be pretty. If I hammer at the cellar door don't open it; I'm probably just collecting for some public charity in hell."

"Can we serenade you with an epithalamium, as you go to marry Death?" asked one of the bearers, tucking in the shroud to make it cozy.

"Save your doggy breath. Go, go, on to the rest of your lives, you lot. It's been a swell, mysterious mess of a life. Don't mind me. I'll blow the candles out before I lower my own lights."

A year later when a sister ventured into the crypt to prepare for another burial, she came across the hem of Yackle's shroud. She wept at the notion of death until Yackle sat up and said, "What, morning already? And I having those naughty dreams!" The maunt's tears turned to screams, and she fled upstairs to start immediately upon a long and lively career as an alcoholic.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4

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AvenueQ

Posted October 29, 2008

more from this reviewer

Too much exposition, not enough plot.

I greatly enjoyed the first two books in the Wicked series. This only added to my disappointment with this book. While the idea of hearing the untold story of the Cowardly Lion does sound intriguing, this book lacked much in the way of a continuing storyline. Outside of retrospection, this book did very little in the way of furthering the story in respect to the first two books. While I wouldn't say not to read the book, I will say to wait for the paperback or borrow it from a friend as it was not worth the $20. In all due respect to Mr.Maguire, I think this book seemed more like a paycheck than a story. While I would love to see how things turn out for Brrr, Nor, Candle, and Liir, I would not want to spend over 300 pages to advance one day in the overall story.

5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
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jdroberts

Posted January 15, 2012

For one grownup on fairy tales

Maguire takes the lovely fairy tale world of the Wizard of Oz and twists the plot into a deeply intriguing and dark tale in this series. All are must reads.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted January 7, 2012

Wonderful

Loved how this book kept OZ and its people alive!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted January 6, 2012

Loved it!

Not as great as the first two. I felt like this one was little harder to follow, but in the end everything came together.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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sugarpy18

Posted April 10, 2010

I Also Recommend:

A Lion Among Men

If you read and liked Wicked and Son of the Witch, then you will definitely like this book. Just like the first two books, A Lion Among Men is sharply written, with interesting characters and a gripping plot. Not only do we find out the life story of the Lion who helped Dorothy kill the Wicked Witch, but we furthermore learn the story of Oz, the Witch, her son and other characters involved in their lives. Gregory Maguire's writing style is addictive, it was hard for me to put the book down.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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anniebngreg

Posted March 18, 2010

more from this reviewer

A Lion isn't as Wondrous as the other two.

I enjoyed reading this, although I wasn't as smitten as with WICKED, nor with SON of a WITCH. The prose is still wondrous and the imaginations of Mr Maguire are rich and full. I'm looking forward to the 4th in the Series, although not with as much eagerness as I sought #3.
It's good to connect and read all three in the series in order, and I'm glad I did. It's just not as fine.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted March 16, 2009

I Also Recommend:

A good read, but its predecessors were better

This book was good and interesting for the overall storyline, but in itself it had a lot of slow parts. It was a good story of the life of the Cowardly Lion but again was too dragged out.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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WilV

Posted November 14, 2008

I Also Recommend:

Grreat!

Another great work from the wicked years. The character of Brr (cowardly Lion) was moving and his story compelling. The story follows this lonely misunderstood creature as he learns some of life's harder lessons and attempts to find his place in the world.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted May 20, 2008

Wicked Rules!

OMG! I can't wait for this to come out! It is going to be amazing!!! YAY!

1 out of 16 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted January 19, 2012

Gr

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted January 2, 2012

Highly recommended

This is a great series. The twist on the stories are very entertaining.
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Anonymous

Posted December 3, 2011

Fair

I'm quite a fan of Mr. Maguire's and of his Oz series. This is my least-favorite of his books. Brrr's story is good to know, but he may not have been the best character to choose for an entire book. Several parts of Brrr's autobiographical reflections are rather boring and don't do much to develop the overall story arc. Congratulations, though, to Mr. M for developing Yackle, a seemingly minor character in the first two books, into such an interesting character. Only recommended for fans.
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wildboars

Posted October 23, 2011

Good closer

A little slow in points but nice closer to good series.
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alicelouise

Posted October 10, 2011

more from this reviewer

This book wouldn't have existed...

without "Wicked" or "Son of a Witch".

I was intrigued by the Cowardly Lion and maybe a counter novel to L. Frank Baum's Oz novel of the Cowardly Lion. It was not to be.

The characterization of Brr was great. In the lines of dialogue you could almost hear Bert Lahr's voice for Brr. You find out that he is not so craven as much as he is a pragmatist. In times of great upheaval Brr lands on his feet. He may not land in a glorious manner; mind you. He might only gain a laughable title. He does land and not get driven out or swept away like the other Animals.

The other characters were dropped too quickly and were swept away. I wanted more of Cubbins and Jemmsy. It may have been done by design.

I hope the 4th book draws from the Baum novel that features TikTok, Pumpkinhead, and Mombi.

The timeline goes back and forth from past to present without warning. Those who enjoy characterization will enjoy this novel(as with Son of a Witch). If you want a coherent plot, you may be in for frustration and disappointment.
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Anonymous

Posted July 21, 2011

Fanstastic idea, brillent pupputer and a tragic stroy of our Brrr

What a smart way to patch the quilt by filling the missing pieces of Wicked and Son of a Witch, but there are some holes left unstich
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toon_boi

Posted June 7, 2011

more from this reviewer

I Also Recommend:

Boring But Mother Yackle Isn't

It's apparent that I liked this book more the first time I read it than compared to now. I wouldn't recommend this book, but the fans of the Wicked Years novels and the curious will find it difficult to not read it at least once for themselves. It is a boring book as the Lion goes on and on about his life's events and mistakes. The conversations between Mother Yackle and Brrr, the Cowardly Lion are what wake up both the story and the reader. Mother Yackle is one of my favorite characters in these books. At the end, Gregory Maguire has you wanting more when Yackle speaks about Elphaba, Liir, Candle, and Liir's daughter. I'm hoping that if he writes another Wicked Years novel that it'll be about Liir's daughter and have a feel more like 'Wicked' did.
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Anonymous

Posted May 11, 2011

Ok

It was ok but not great. I loved Wicked and Son of a Witch so this was a bit of a disappointment. Good because it answered some questions about characters in the previous books but left a lot unanswered as well. Learned more about Yackle but wish i knew more about Lirr and his family and what happened to them. It was ok.
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hotwheelsdave

Posted April 2, 2011

I Also Recommend:

"We're.....Off To Be Amazed and Intrigued AGAIN...."

The "Wonderful Wizard of Oz", aka Gregory Maguire, has once again spun a captivating tale of the reimagined, fleshed-out Oz in this third installment of the Wicked Years Series. Here we're immersed in the doings of the Cowardly Lion and the truth of his past as originally hinted about in Wicked. We journey with him through his recollection of his life while he acts as an Emerald City agent-interrogator of other Oz-ians for whom he's charged with collecting information for the present EC dictator, The Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba's younger brother. Primarily revolving around the Lion's talks with an ancient matron "Maunt", one of the EC's modern religious followers of the "Unamed G-d", Maguire unfolds page upon page of surprising detail and intriguing invention of complicated characters and situations over a period of many years in the Lion's and Maunt's lives. The ending is a whirlwind of unexpected changes and revelations about the Lion, the political machine from the Emerald City and Elphaba's and her son Liir's legacies intertwined with the dragon-clock "prophet" prophecies and it's keepers of the ancient religion of Oz. Will we see a book 4 reveal the truth of Elphaba's grand-daughter, her brother-the religious zealot tyranical dictator in the EC and his war against the Munchkinlanders (his own kin!),and what happened to the Lion and Elphaba's book of magic, the Grimmery???!!! I digress and get carried away...this book is that great! Enjoy!!
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lyaffeld

Posted March 25, 2011

If you enjoyed reading wicked and Son of A Witch...

I got a kick out of this, the author knows about cat behavior. The personality of this lion is very endearing and I will read it again as I do all my favorite books. This book is every bit as interesting as the other two in the series. It answers questions that I had from the previous stories.
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lovingmynook

Posted February 6, 2011

Another good one

Have really enjoyed the series. Can't wait to read more
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A Lion among Men (Wicked Years Series #3)

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Gregory Maguire

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Rating Distribution

Too much exposition, not enough plot.

For one grownup on fairy tales

Wonderful

Loved it!

A Lion Among Men

A Lion isn't as Wondrous as the other two.

A good read, but its predecessors were better

Grreat!

Wicked Rules!

Gr

Highly recommended

Fair

Good closer

This book wouldn't have existed...

Fanstastic idea, brillent pupputer and a tragic stroy of our Brrr

Boring But Mother Yackle Isn't

Ok

"We're.....Off To Be Amazed and Intrigued AGAIN...."

If you enjoyed reading wicked and Son of A Witch...

Another good one