Title: What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy
Author: Gregory Maguire
Publish Date: 2007

So I loved Wicked, Maguire's cynical Wizard of Oz AU; I think it's brilliant in its intricate sideways look at Baum's universe. I liked Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, his retelling of Cinderella, reasonably well. But I didn't find What-the-Dickens more than moderately amusing.

The concept is not bad. Three children and their young adult cousin, stranded without power in the course of an unspecified disaster, pass the time with the story of What-the-Dickens, a feral tooth fairy, and his search for home and purpose.

Okay, fine — but I had trouble caring about either set of characters. And I am inclined to blame this largely on Maguire's style. The man is, I'm sorry, crap at dialogue. He falls so much in love with his own flights of verbal fancy that all his characters wind up talking like each other, and like the narrator. Efforts to remedy this, like the fairy Pepper's sloppy grammar, just make them sound even more artificial.

In the Oz books, as in more traditional fairy tales, everyone talks pretty much the same anyway, and in a narrative like that it doesn't matter; the characters are generally archetypes anyway. In What-the-Dickens, which is framed squarely in a modern American setting, it jars. A lot. Ten-year-old homeschooled Dinah is just as self-consciously whimsical as her 21-year-old cousin Gage, the literally born-yesterday What-the-Dickens, and the canny old tooth fairy patriarch.

So while it's a cute story — two cute stories — I couldn't really get into it, and I'm not sure the target audience could, either. Kids don't care so much about individual voices, but they sure as hell know artificial when they hear it.

Rating: 6/10