book review! wicked

I’m doing the very nifty Twelve in 12 thing where you read a book a month for twelve months and post reviews on the website – since I ended up writing it here first because I couldn’t finish it and didn’t want to save a partially done review on that site. Hey, I thought, why not just post them here too! So, here ya go:

Wicked
Author: Gregory MacGuire
406 pages

Riverwolf beat me to this review – oddly enough, we both read Wicked for November, so here’s Review #2:

I happened to see Wicked at a local bookstore for a good price, and have had several people tell me how much they liked it, so I picked up a copy. And I’m so glad I did. When I was a child, I read every Oz book L. Frank Baum wrote, over and over and over. I’m so familiar with the traditional version of Oz that I feel kind of like I, ummmmm,  grew up there. Which made me a little apprehensive about a different  Oz – but I throughly approve of this one too.

Gregory MacGuire did a wonderful job making his Oz both very familiar – Munchins, the Yellow Brick Road, the Emerald City, the tornado dropping the house on the Wicked Witch of the East – yet extremely different. Different and much more realistic. As scary as Baum’s Oz could be, it was still a reassuring place where animals talk and good always wins and nobody dies, unless they are evil. MacGuire’s Oz is kind of Baum’s Oz with a glaze of reality for adults.  There are Animals who talk and have jobs and are much like people, and there are animals that are like our normal, non-talking animals. The Wicked Witch of the West is a green-skinned girl named Elphaba  whose father is a religious fanatic and who ends up being roommates at the university with Galinda, an airheaded, flighty socialite who just wants to be admired and to marry money. Oz is stricken with droughts and poverty and the Wizard is a tyrant who is waging a campaign against the Animals and trying to take away their rights to live and work like humans. There are dueling religions and regional problems and lots of political upheaval.

Most of all, Wicked is about questioning the whole concept of evil. What evil is, what evil is not, if there even is any such thing as evil. The Wicked Witch of the West has always been portrayed as evil, as has her smushed sister the Wicked Witch of the East. But Elphaba is just a girl with green skin who goes to college and becomes involved in Animal rights. For starters. Her transformation into the Wicked Witch isn’t all what you would expect,  just like she isn’t at all the person you expect the Wicked Witch to be, and I found myself dreading the end of the book because of what I knew happens in the Baum version. Her traditionally evil sister is an overly religious girl with a serious handicap and a pair of stunning red shoes who becomes a ruler by default. Galinda, who changes her name to Glinda, is not at all the Glinda The Good from Baum’s books and the movie. And Dorothy is just some weird but likable kid who has fallen from the sky into the middle of a political brouhaha and can’t get the red shoes off her feet.

This is the first thing I’ve read by Gregory MacGuire, but I can’t wait to get a copy of Son of a Witch now.