pietrog9 's review for:

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

3.0

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I'm ambivalent about this. When I first read it many years ago, I didn't like it at all. I expected it to be frothy and campy like the MGM movie, or whimsical like the Baum books, and it is very much none of those things. This time, trying again having forgotten the details but expecting darkness and not whimsy, I was actually really engaged in the first few sections. But the later chapters were disappointing. I think Maguire comes up with really interesting ideas for his novels but the execution is mostly dour and humorless and despite writing a novel set in the archetypal magic land he doesn't even really do magic very well. Elphaba is an interesting character in some ways - her spikiness and inability or unwillingness to fit in at first make her engaging - but then in the latter half of the book she's just so passive. Also, so much of the action of this novel takes place off screen (as it were). The section where Elphaba is essentially a terrorist is told from the point of view of a character who doesn't know what's going on, and then the rest of the action is mostly her hiding out in a castle while all the exciting stuff is just alluded to. I will try the other books in the series, because Maguire is inventive, but I wish I liked this more.