From Powells.com
Can we safely call Gregory Maguire's Wizard of Oz prequel, Wicked,
a sensation? Having sold three-quarters of a million copies since its 1995
publication, now the novel is enjoying a second life as a big-budget Broadway
musical directed by Tony Award winner Joe Mantello. In his first book for
adults, Maguire explored Oz in the years before Dorothy's arrival, revealing
some critical facts too long obscured by L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel and
the classic 1939 motion picture. What made the Wicked Witch so wicked, anyway?
As Maguire notes, "She wears black and she's kind of ugly; she doesn't
seem to take care of her skin very well," but that hardly justifies
her nasty reputation. "It's a staggering feat of wordcraft," the
Los Angeles Times marveled, "made no less so by the fact that
its boundaries were set decades ago by somebody else." Dave, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Chapter One Munchkinlanders The Root of Evil
From the crumpled bed the wife said, "I think today's the day. Look how low I've gone."
"Today? That would be like you, perverse and inconvenient," said her husband, teasing her, standing at the doorway and looking outward, over the lake, the fields, the forested slopes beyond. He could just make out the chimneys of Rush Margins, breakfast fires smoking. "The worst possible moment for my ministry. Naturally."
The wife yawned. "There's not a lot of choice involved. From what I hear. Your body gets this big and it takes over--if you can't accommodate it, sweetheart, you just get out of its way. It's on a track of its own and nothing stops it "now."" She pushed herself up, trying to see over the rise of her belly. "I feel like a hostage to myself. Or to the baby."
"Exert some self-control." He came to her side and helped her sit up. "Think of it as a spiritual exercise. Custody of the senses. Bodily as well as ethical continence."
"Self-control?" She laughed, inching toward the edge of the bed. "I have no self left. I'm only a host for the parasite. Where's my "self," anyway? Where'd I leave that tired old thing?"
"Think of me." His tone had changed; he meant this.
"Frex"--she headed him off--"when the volcano's ready there's no priest in the world can pray it quiet."
"What will my fellow ministers think?"
"They'll get together and say, 'Brother Frexspar, did you allow your wife to deliver your first child when you had a community problem to solve? How inconsiderate of you; it shows a lack of authority. You're fired from the position.'" She was ribbing him now, for there was no one to fire him. The nearest bishop wastoo distant to pay attention to the particulars of a unionist cleric in the hinterland.
"It's just such terrible timing."
"I do think you bear half the blame for the timing," she said. "I mean, after all, Frex."
"That's how the thinking goes, but I wonder,"
"You wonder?" She laughed, her head going far back. The line from her ear to the hollow below her throat reminded Frex of an elegant silver ladle. Even in morning disarray, with a belly like a scow, she was majestically good-looking. Her hair had the bright lacquered look of wet fallen oak leaves in sunlight. He blamed her for being born to privilege and admired her efforts to overcome it--and all the while he loved her, too.
"You mean you wonder if you're the father"--she grabbed the bedstead; Frex took hold of her other arm and hauled her half-upright--"or do you question the fatherliness of men in general?" She stood, mammoth, an ambulatory island. Moving out the door at a slug's pace, she laughed at such an idea. He could hear her laughing from the outhouse even as he began to dress for the day's battle.
Frex combed his beard and oiled his scalp. He fastened a clasp of bone and rawhide at the nape of his neck, to keep the hair out of his face, because his expressions today had to be readable from a distance: There could be no fuzziness to his meaning. He applied some coal dust to darken his eyebrows, a smear of red wax on his flat cheeks. He shaded his lips, A handsome priest attracted more penitents than a homely one.
In the kitchen yard Melena floated gently, not with the normal gravity of pregnancy but as if inflated, a huge balloon trailing its strings through the dirt. She carried a skillet in one handand a few eggs and the whiskery tips of autumn chives in the other. She sang to herself, but only in short phrases. Frex wasn't meant to hear her.
His sober gown buttoned tight to the collar, his sandals strapped on over leggings, Frex took from its hiding place--beneath a chest of drawers--the report sent to him from his fellow minister over in the village of Three Dead Trees. He hid the brown pages within his sash. He had been keeping them from his wife, afraid that she would want to come along--to see the fun, if it was amusing, or to suffer the thrill of it if it was terrifying.
As Frex breathed deeply, readying his lungs for a day of oratory, Melena dangled a wooden spoon in the skillet and stirred the eggs. The tinkle of cowbells sounded across the lake. She did not listen; or she listened but to something else, to something inside her. It was sound without melody--like dream music, remembered for its effect but not for its harmonic distresses and recoveries. She imagined it was the child inside her, humming for happiness. She knew he would be a singing child.
Melena heard Frex inside, beginning to extemporize, warming up, calling forth the rolling phrases of his argument, convincing himself again of his righteousness.
How did that proverb go, the one that Nanny singsonged to her, years ago, in the nursery?
Born in the morning,
Woe without warning;
Afternoon child
Woeful and wild;
Born in the evening,
Woe ends in grieving.
Night baby borning
Same as the morning.
But she remembered this as a joke, fondly. Woe is the natural end of life, yet we go on having babies.
No, said Nanny, an echo in Melena's mind (and editorializing asusual): No, no, you pretty little pampered hussy. We "don't" go on having babies, that's quite apparent. We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it--we're slow learners, we women--we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production.
But men don't dry up, Melena objected; they can father to the death.
Ah, we're slow learners, Nanny countered. But "they" can't learn at all.
"Breakfast," said Melena, spooning eggs onto a wooden plate. Her son would not be as dull as most men. She would raise him up to defy the onward progress of woe.
"It is a time of crisis for our society," recited Frex. For a man who condemned worldly pleasures he ate with elegance. She loved to watch the arabesque of fingers and two forks. She suspected that beneath his righteous asceticism he possessed a hidden longing for the easy life.
"Every day is a great crisis for our society." She was being flip, answering him in the terms men use. Dear thick thing, he didn't hear the irony in her voice.
"We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values in jeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned."
Review
"An outstanding work of imagination." USA Today
Review
"A magnificent work, a genuine tour de force." Lloyd Alexander, author of the Chronicles of Prydain
Review
"Listen up, Munchkins. Stop your singing, stop the dancing. The Wicked Witch is no longer dead. But not to worry. Gregory Maguire's shrewdly imagined and beautifully written first novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, not only revives her but re-envisions and redeems her for our times." Newsday
Review
"Maguire combines puckish humor and bracing pessimism in this fantastical meditation on good and evil, God and free will, which should...captivate devotees of fantasy." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Maguire has taken this figure of childhood fantasy and given her a sensual and powerful nature that will stir adult hearts with fear and longing all over again. It's a brilliant trick and a remarkable treat." Times-Picayune
Review
"It's a staggering feat of wordcraft, made no less so by the fact that its boundaries were set decades ago by somebody else. Would that all books with this much innate consumer appeal were also this good. And vice versa." Los Angeles Times
Review
"[An] amazing novel." John Updike, The New Yorker
Review
"It is for good readers who like satire, and love exceedingly imaginative and clever fantasy." School Library Journal
Review
"That Wicked is a first novel is remarkable because it is so fully realized, so rich and involving. It is the most seamless interweaving of fantasy and reality since John Crowley's peerless Little, Big, written in poetic language as graceful as a Ray Boldger tap-dance." The Commercial Appeal
Synopsis
This is the book that started it all The basis for the smash hit Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Gregory Maguire's breathtaking New York Times "bestseller Wicked "views the land of Oz, its inhabitants, its Wizard, and the Emerald City, through a darker and greener (not rosier) lens. Brilliantly inventive, Wicked" offers us a radical new evaluation of one of the most feared and hated characters in all of literature: the much maligned Wicked Witch of the West who, as Maguire tells us, wasn t nearly as Wicked "as we imagined."
Synopsis
The New York Times bestseller and basis for the Tony-winning hit musical, soon to be a major motion picture starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande
With millions of copies in print around the world, Gregory Maguire's Wicked is established not only as a commentary on our time but as a novel to revisit for years to come. Wicked relishes the inspired inventions of L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, while playing sleight of hand with our collective memories of the 1939 MGM film starring Margaret Hamilton (and Judy Garland). In this fast-paced, fantastically real, and supremely entertaining novel, Maguire has populated the largely unknown world of Oz with the power of his own imagination.
Years before Dorothy and her dog crash-land, another little girl makes her presence known in Oz. This girl, Elphaba, is born with emerald-green skin--no easy burden in a land as mean and poor as Oz, where superstition and magic are not strong enough to explain or overcome the natural disasters of flood and famine. Still, Elphaba is smart, and by the time she enters Shiz University, she becomes a member of a charmed circle of Oz's most promising young citizens.
But Elphaba's Oz is no utopia. The Wizard's secret police are everywhere. Animals--those creatures with voices, souls, and minds--are threatened with exile. Young Elphaba, green and wild and misunderstood, is determined to protect the Animals--even if it means combating the mysterious Wizard, even if it means risking her single chance at romance. Ever wiser in guilt and sorrow, she can find herself grateful when the world declares her a witch. And she can even make herself glad for that young girl from Kansas.
Recognized as an iconoclastic tour de force on its initial publication, the novel has inspired the blockbuster musical of the same name--one of the longest-running plays in Broadway history. Popular, indeed. But while the novel's distant cousins hail from the traditions of magical realism, mythopoeic fantasy, and sprawling nineteenth-century sagas of moral urgency, Maguire's Wicked is as unique as its green-skinned witch.
Synopsis
When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious Witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil?
Gregory Maguire creates a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again. Wicked is about a land where animals talk and strive to be treated like first-class citizens, Munchkinlanders seek the comfort of middle-class stability, and the Tin Man becomes a victim of domestic violence. And then there is the little green-skinned girl named Elphaba, who will grow up to become the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, a smart, prickly, and misunderstood creature who challenges all our preconceived notions about the nature of good and evil.
Synopsis
This is the book that started it all! The basis for the smash hit Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Gregory Maguire's breathtaking New York Times bestseller Wicked views the land of Oz, its inhabitants, its Wizard, and the Emerald City, through a darker and greener (not rosier) lens. Brilliantly inventive, Wicked offers us a radical new evaluation of one of the most feared and hated characters in all of literature: the much maligned Wicked Witch of the West who, as Maguire tells us, wasnt nearly as Wicked as we imagined.
About the Author
Gregory Maguire received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Tufts University. His work as a consultant in creative writing for children takes him to speaking engagements across the United States and abroad. He is a founder and codirector of Children's Literature New England, Incorporated, a non-profit educational charity established in 1987. The author of numerous books for children, Mr. Maguire is also a contributor to Am I Blue?: Coming Out From the Silence, a collection of short stories for gay and lesbian teenagers.