When Dorothy follows the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, young Munchkin inventor Pip Cogwheel chooses the forbidden Red Brick Road instead. Armed with mechanical ingenuity and insatiable curiosity, Pip discovers a cryptic message from the crushed Wicked Witch of the East about Oz's hidden power.
Gathering an unlikely band of companionsâJack Pumpkinhead, Tik-Tok the mechanical man, the acrobatic Patchwork Girl, and Billina the practical henâPip journeys through transformed landscapes and forgotten territories. Their path leads to the Crimson Citadel, where they discover Malinda, the Forgotten Witch and eldest sister of the wicked witches, imprisoned for attempting to unite Oz's four divided countries.
As Dorothy's adventure exposes the Wizard as a fraud, Pip's parallel journey reveals a deeper conspiracy: the Wizard helped erase Malinda from history to maintain Oz's artificial divisions. Now Pip must choose between restoring the forgotten witch or preserving the status quo.
Through mechanical wonders and ancient magic, "The Red Brick Road" explores themes of choosing your own path, questioning authority, and discovering that truth is more complex than fairy tales suggest. It's a story about bridgesâbetween magic and technology, memory and history, and ultimately, between a divided land learning to heal.
When Dorothy follows the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, young Munchkin inventor Pip Cogwheel chooses the forbidden Red Brick Road instead. Armed with mechanical ingenuity and insatiable curiosity, Pip discovers a cryptic message from the crushed Wicked Witch of the East about Oz's hidden power.
Gathering an unlikely band of companionsâJack Pumpkinhead, Tik-Tok the mechanical man, the acrobatic Patchwork Girl, and Billina the practical henâPip journeys through transformed landscapes and forgotten territories. Their path leads to the Crimson Citadel, where they discover Malinda, the Forgotten Witch and eldest sister of the wicked witches, imprisoned for attempting to unite Oz's four divided countries.
As Dorothy's adventure exposes the Wizard as a fraud, Pip's parallel journey reveals a deeper conspiracy: the Wizard helped erase Malinda from history to maintain Oz's artificial divisions. Now Pip must choose between restoring the forgotten witch or preserving the status quo.
Through mechanical wonders and ancient magic, "The Red Brick Road" explores themes of choosing your own path, questioning authority, and discovering that truth is more complex than fairy tales suggest. It's a story about bridgesâbetween magic and technology, memory and history, and ultimately, between a divided land learning to heal.
The confetti had finally stopped falling.
Pip Cogwheel crouched behind the largest toadstool house in Munchkinland, her copper hair catching the late afternoon sun as she peered around the curved wall. The celebration was winding down. Munchkins swept flower petals from their doorsteps, chattering excitedly about the girl from Kansas who had freed them from the Wicked Witch of the East. Children played with paper windmills, spinning them in the gentle breeze that still carried the scent of the departed tornado.
But Pip wasn't watching the cleanup. Her bright eyes, magnified behind the brass goggles she'd built herself, were fixed on the house that had started it all.
Dorothy's house sat exactly where it had landed hours ago, right on top of what remained of the Wicked Witch of the East. The silver shoes that had adorned the witch's feet were gone now, taken by the girl from Kansas on Glinda's advice. All that remained were the striped stockings, slowly dissolving into green mist that made Pip's eyes water when the wind shifted.
"Well, that was quite the hullabaloo," said Billina, the yellow hen perched on Pip's shoulder. Unlike the other animals in Oz, Billina had always been able to speak, much to the confusion of the other Munchkins. "In my day, witches stayed properly alive or properly dead. None of this dropping houses business."
Pip adjusted her goggles and stood, brushing dust from her oil-stained blue overalls. She'd spent the morning hiding, not celebrating. While the other Munchkins danced and sang their gratitude to Dorothy, Pip had watched from the shadows, her inventor's mind spinning with questions no one else seemed to be asking.
"Billina," she whispered, "why didn't anyone ask about the red road?"
The hen ruffled her feathers. "What red road? The girl followed the Yellow Brick Road to Emerald City, just as she should."
But Pip had seen it. When Glinda the Good had gestured toward the spiraling path that would lead Dorothy to the Wizard, Pip's modified goggles had caught something the others had missed. There hadn't been just one road beginning at that magical spiral. There had been two.
The Yellow Brick Road, bright and welcoming, had carried Dorothy away toward the Emerald City and whatever destiny awaited her there. But the Red Brick Roadâdarker, older, with weeds growing between its worn bricksâhad curved in the opposite direction, toward the mysterious South.
Toward Quadling Country, where Glinda herself ruled.
If the good witch lived in the South, why had she sent Dorothy north to see the Wizard instead of south to her own palace?
The village was quieting now. Munchkins retreated into their mushroom homes for supper, their voices carrying on the evening air. Stories of the day's excitement, speculation about whether the girl from Kansas would succeed in her quest, relief that the Wicked Witch of the East would terrorize them no more.
Pip waited until the last of them had disappeared indoors before stepping out from her hiding place.
"Where are you going?" Billina asked, though she made no move to leave her perch on Pip's shoulder.
"To look at something," Pip replied, walking toward the witch's remains.
The green mist was thicker now, swirling around the striped stockings in patterns that almost looked like letters. As Pip approached, she pulled a small vial from her tool belt and carefully collected some of the mist. It might be useful laterâwitch's essence always was, according to the old stories her grandmother had told her.
But as she knelt by the dissolving remains, something else caught her attention. Half-hidden beneath what had once been the witch's black dress, something metallic glinted in the fading sunlight.
Pip reached carefully into the green mist, her hand closing around a chain. She pulled, and up came a silver key, ornate and ancient, with symbols carved into its surface that made her goggles tingle with magical energy.
"I wouldn't touch that if I were you," Billina clucked nervously. "Dead witch belongings are never good news."
But Pip was already examining the key, turning it over in her palm. The symbols weren't in any Munchkin script she knew, but they seemed familiar somehow. And wrapped around the chain was a piece of parchment, partially burned but still readable.
"Sister," Pip read aloud, her voice barely a whisper. "The crimson path holds the true power of Oz. They made them forget, but the road remembers. Find the Citadel. Unite theâ" The rest was burned away.
"Crimson path?" Billina's voice rose an octave. "You mean the Red Brick Road? The one everyone says leads nowhere?"
Pip stood, the key warm in her palm. "Everyone says that because everyone's forgotten. But someone didn't want it forgotten." She looked at the key again, and something deep in her memory stirred. Her grandmother's stories, told in whispers when the witch's spies weren't listening. Tales of a time before the Witch of the East, before the arbitrary divisions that kept the Munchkins separate from the other lands of Oz.
"My grandmother used to tell me stories," Pip said, walking toward the center of the village where the roads began their famous spiral. "Before the witch took her away to the crystal mines. She said the Red Brick Road was older than the Yellow. That it led somewhere important, somewhere they didn't want us to go."
The spiral crossroads lay before them, looking ordinary in the evening light. The Yellow Brick Road stretched toward Emerald City, its gold bricks still gleaming from Dorothy's recent passage. But the Red Brick Road curved the opposite direction, and now that Pip looked closely, she could see that someone had deliberately tried to obscure it. Vines had been planted to grow over the marker stone. Weeds had been allowed to flourish between the bricks. Signs pointing to other destinations had been placed to block the view.
Someone had wanted the Red Brick Road forgotten.
Pip brushed the vines away from the ancient marker stone at the roads' beginning. The stone was older than anything else in Munchkinland, its surface carved with the same strange symbols that decorated the key. As her fingers traced the worn letters, words became visible:
"Two paths diverge in the Land of Oz grand,
One of gold to the Emerald strand,
One of red to the South's hidden hand,
Where forgotten magic still makes its stand."
"South?" Billina asked. "That's Quadling Country. Glinda's domain. Why would she tell that Dorothy girl to go to the Wizard instead of taking the Red Road to her own land?"
Pip pulled her goggles down over her eyes and activated the magical sight enhancement she'd built into them. Immediately, the world transformed. The Yellow Brick Road glowed with warm, golden lightârecent magic, strong but somehow surface-level. But the Red Brick Road...
The Red Brick Road pulsed with deep, crimson energy that seemed to come from the very heart of Oz itself. Ancient magic, older than the Emerald City, older than the Wizard, maybe even older than the witches themselves. And as Pip watched, symbols began to appear on each brick, glowing faintly in response to her presence.
Or perhaps in response to the key she held.
"Billina," Pip whispered, "I think the road is alive."
The hen shifted nervously on her shoulder. "Alive how?"
"Watch." Pip took a step onto the Red Brick Road. The moment her foot touched the first brick, it illuminated, sending a pulse of light racing away down the path like a message being sent. The next brick glowed, then the next, creating a chain of light that disappeared into the mysterious woods beyond Munchkinland.
And from somewhere far away, very faintly, came an answering pulse.
Something was waiting at the end of the Red Brick Road. Something that had been waiting for a very long time.
"Pip," Billina said carefully, "I think we should go home. Back to the workshop. Pretend we never saw this."
But Pip was already putting the key's chain around her neck, tucking the silver key beneath her work shirt where it rested warm against her heart. For sixteen years, she'd lived in the shadows of Munchkinland, fixing broken clocks and building mechanical toys while the Witch of the East ruled with fear. She'd watched her friends disappear into the crystal mines, seen her grandmother taken for asking too many questions about the old days, felt the constant weight of being different in a place where different meant dangerous.
Dorothy had followed her road to find a way home. But Pip had never wanted to go homeâshe'd wanted to find out why home felt like a prison.
"Dorothy has her path," Pip said, taking another step onto the Red Brick Road. The bricks beneath her feet pulsed with warm light, welcoming her. "This one's mine."
She began to walk, each step sending ripples of crimson light racing ahead of her into the unknown. Behind her, the familiar sights of Munchkinland grew smaller. Ahead, the Red Brick Road wound through silver-barked trees she'd never seen before, past flowers that turned to watch her pass, toward whatever secrets had been hidden in the South for so long.
"Oh, we're doing this, are we?" Billina sighed. "Following a mysterious forbidden road because a dead witch left you a cryptic note?"
"The witch didn't leave me the note," Pip replied, her voice growing stronger with each step. "She left it for whoever was brave enoughâor foolish enoughâto ask the questions nobody else would ask."
The road ahead was dark, but the bricks continued to glow beneath her feet, lighting the way forward. And for the first time in her life, Pip Cogwheel felt like she was walking toward something instead of away from it.
"Besides," she added, grinning despite the flutter of fear in her stomach, "someone needs to keep me from getting myself killed."
"I suppose someone does," Billina muttered. "Though I reserve the right to say 'I told you so' when we end up as somebody's dinner."
As the sun set behind them, painting the sky in shades of orange and red, Pip and Billina continued down the Red Brick Road. The path led them through a landscape that seemed to shift and change with each stepâsometimes familiar Munchkin farmland, sometimes stranger terrain that looked like no part of Oz either of them had ever seen.
But the road itself never wavered. It curved and wound, but it always led south, toward Quadling Country and whatever secrets had been hidden there.
And with each step, the silver key grew warmer against Pip's heart, as if it recognized the path and approved of her choice.
Far ahead, in a crystalline citadel built from solidified magic, something stirred in the darkness. After years of imprisonment, after decades of being forgotten, Malinda the Forgotten Witch felt the first footsteps on her road in living memory.
The tinker girl carried her sister's key. The road had accepted her. And after all this time, someone was finally coming to learn the truth about what had really happened to Oz.
Malinda smiled in the darkness, and her smile was both beautiful and terrible to behold.
The game was beginning again.
---
I have to say, as a fan of The Wizard Of Oz and Wicked, I was slightly dubious going into this book, but I actually had a really good time.
Firstly, I can tell the author is a fan of The Wizard of Oz and not just cashing in on a well known story, small details like the silver slippers rather than ruby red make this clear and instantly made me more excited to read the story.
I also love that the author has created brand new characters to expand the world of Oz, whilst paying tribute to the well known characters we have come to know and love.
What I love most about this book is the way it pays homage to the original tale, as whilst Dorothy is on her adventure to the Emerald City, Pip along with new friends she meets along the way, goes on her own adventure (sound familiar?), albeit down a very different path, both literally, and figuratively.
I really enjoyed the parallels to the original Wizard of Oz tale, such as a pumpkin boy (who I feel is a combination of both the Cowardly Lion and the scarecrow), a copper man (clearly referencing the tin man. We're even introduced to him frozen and in need or winding up), and a patchwork girl (a clear homage to the scarecrow).
Pip and Bellina act as this tales Dorothy and Toto respectively.
It is a genius way to settle us into the story as we have those clear character parallels and instantly feel familiar with these brand new characters because we revisit the old favourites a little later on.
I don't want to say too much about the plot as I would encourage people to pick this up for themselves, but I will say I had a great time and it's clear a lot of work has gone into making this story as great as it clearly is.
I noticed at the of the book that sequels to this may be coming and I for one look forward to picking these up!