A review by lizbethandthelifeinbetween
A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire

adventurous challenging dark sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

I don't think Maguire is a good world-builder. He is a character author. There are a bit too many "world-building" elements in the book, usually offhand comments about some random thing that sounds vaguely Ozian but has no actual consequence on the plot nor do they do anything to make Oz feel like a lived-in vibrant place. In this vein, the names were getting to me. There seems to be no explainable aiming convention. Some names feel like they fit as they capture the whimsy of the original story, however, Maguire's writing is not whimsical whatsoever, so it creates tonal conflict, especially when some people have very believable names and others are called something silly. If there were more consistency between the different cultures and the naming conventions this would have been a strong point to help distinguish between all the different peoples of Oz. 

 

This book differs from the previous two installments (and I will admit I read both of those before I started Goodreads, so well over six years ago when I was certainly too young) in that the structure has changed completely and we are no longer following the Thropp family. Much like “A Column of Fire” by Ken Follet, I don’t think such a dramatic change in style benefits the series as people, like myself, who were fans of the first two installments can get put off by this. It’s better suited to a spin off in my opinion. I wouldn’t say that necessarily makes a book bad, but I’ve always found those types of shifts jarring when it happens in the middle of a series. 

 

Unfortunately, the first 75% of this book feels boring and inconsequential. We follow the Lion, Brrr, and some other characters who drift in and out of the plot as ponder about the events of the past two books. The total change in structure means the reader has little connection to Brrr and is merely invested in the story insomuch as they are invested in finding out what happens to Liir. Frankly I did not enjoy Brrr as a character and he was vastly overshadowed by his supporting characters like Yackle. There’s a long interlude with a talking bear that felt pointless and made me notice from the start how off the world building feels. I know there are politics around talking animals, but for the life of me I can’t tell you what that means. I think I was substituting in the politics from Narnia since I had nothing concrete for Oz. 

 

I still don’t quite understand why this book is about Brrr and I think that’s what bugging me the most. This entire series feels like an afterthought, this book I particular. It does not feel like this was planned out as a series from day one, and I felt like this book spent a lot of time trying to justify the series a whole instead of being interesting. It spent a lot of time rehashing old plot information from the first two novels and justifying them instead of moving the series a whole forward. That last 25% was the best part of the book. It was the only part of the book that kept me reading late until I finished the entire thing. Yet the first 75% is an inconsequential drag that I was so tempted to DNF save for the fact I knew that the ending had something important to the rest of the series. I just wish we had a better path to get here because reading that felt like a chore.