Search - Wicked (Wicked Years, Bk 1)

Not at all like the musical. If this is why you want to read the book you will be disappointed.

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire begins decades before Dorothy falls into the scene, with the birth of a strangely green baby girl who has unusually sharp teeth. We follow Elphaba as she grows up, attends university, and falls into the political turmoil behind the scenes at the Emerald City. Maguire paints a detailed background of the realistic politics that shape Oz into the country it is when Dorothy arrives. The Wicked Witch of the West may be a tortured soul, but for different reasons than you had previously thought. The book is perfectly understandable even if you have never seen the movie or read the original book, but several parts are much funnier if you have. The end of the story can drag on if you are not interested in introspective psychological monologues, but flipping past a few pages of internal commentary can speed the story along.

Literary Quality: 8/10

Enjoyment: 8/10

Fairy tale retelling, interesting reading and silly at times, but like the other Maguire book I've read before--Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister--I found it to be a bit slow and draggy in spots, and my attention wandered. Definitely not as good as all the hype had me hoping for. Still, I found the speculation as to the origins of Glinda and Elphaba--and her dead sister and the ruby (actually silver) slippers from L. Frank Baum's tale quite interesting and amusing, as were the political machinations that got the Wizard where was when Dorothy came on the scene a few years later. Maguire certainly has an imagination! I’d like to see the Broadway production of this, though--I bet that would be something!

The only luck is bad, all fate is unkind, the prime ingredient of the universe is selfishness leavened with malevolence.

To me Wicked was fabulous. The musical version sucked out loud! The book is NOTHING like the musical, it's so much darker and deeper. If you've ever felt like the little weird green girl, this is a book for you.

I simply didn't like it. No fault of the book; just not my style. I had seen the play Wicked, and somehow had the delusion that the play was based at least loosely on the book -- even though everyone I knew who had read it told me it wouldn't be.