The Witch could wait. They would meet again - Excerpt from Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

The book is quite lit­er­ally about what it says it is about: The life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Seri­ously, that’s what it is about. The book cen­tres around the life of Elphaba, the green-​skinned, sharp-​featured and sharp-​tongued girl who would one day be the Wicked Witch of the West, and who would be felled by a young girl from Kansas. The book is split into dif­fer­ent stages of Elphaba’s life and seem more like snip­pets rather than entire sec­tions. I had to admit that I was skep­ti­cal about what this book could pos­si­bly pro­vide for me, but at 519 pages (at least my copy was) it had to be saying some­thing.

As it turns out it says an awful lot, and for the most part it does so with page-​turning enter­tain­ment. It touches on many topics that though Elphaba seems to be inter­twined with, is not the direct cause of. Topics such as seg­re­ga­tion, polit­i­cal intrigue, affairs, oppres­sion, and depres­sion. Though these topics may be old hat to those who pay atten­tion to the world around us, it must still be noted that these very topics are so casu­ally and seam­lessly inte­grated into the book that I didn’t even real­ize how well a job Mr. Maguire had done until I was nearly done the book. The writ­ing style is both smooth and easy to follow and doesn’t get bogged down with the mul­ti­tudes of detail that plague many fan­tasy novels.

Mr. Maguire does a very good job of build­ing a world that mir­rors what was orig­i­nally made, but adding his own touch of real­ism to it. Gone are the sing-​a-​longs and the joy joy feel­ings, and in their places are real char­ac­ters, a depth to the dif­fer­ent peo­ples of Oz, and an under­ly­ing ten­sion within the soci­eties. Char­ac­ters are given as much back story and devel­op­ment as is needed, which may sound like a bit of a cop-​out, but it isn’t. The char­ac­ters don’t seem shal­low, but nei­ther are there pages ded­i­cated to need­less char­ac­ter intro­duc­tions when they do not play a major role.

As pre­vi­ously men­tioned, the book is cut into sec­tions which dic­tate the hap­pen­ings through­out Elphaba’s life within given points in time. This is a double-​edged blade, as there are sec­tions that I wanted to con­tinue read­ing, and others - namely the last - that I wished to be shorter. I admit that there must be a cutoff point for each sec­tion, lest the book move more into the 3000 page region, but still. I will say that i liked the book for the most part. All sec­tions exclud­ing the last were enjoy­able and drew me in. Gre­gory really knows how to make you feel for people.

Then the last sec­tion comes along, and it gets very meta-​physical and sort of fiz­zles out. The book ends much as one would expect, but I found the ending to be rather weak in com­par­i­son to the rest of the book. It left a sour taste in my mouth and had me wish­ing that I had stopped read­ing a couple chap­ters before the end. This is easily the novels major prob­lem. The rest of it is a solid read it’s the ending that takes away from it all.

A good read, and worth read­ing at least once to say you have (it makes those Sunday talks in the knit­ting circle that much more cul­tured) and I’ll still end up read­ing at least Son of a Witch.

7/10