tomjcarle021 's review for:

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
4.75
adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful mysterious sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes
 
How do we persevere when the world around us is cruel, tragic, and unscrupulous? And what if our very existence begins in deception and otherness—our very skin marked green from birth? 
Gregory Maguire’s Wicked reimagines the Wicked Witch of the West, asking readers to reconsider the nature of wickedness itself. In Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Witch appears inherently evil, as though she were born that way. Maguire instead challenges the idea that anyone can be born wicked. 
In one pivotal scene, Elphaba encounters a fortune-telling TikTok machine. The dwarf operating it refuses to predict her fate: “Nothing is written in the stars … No one controls your destiny.” Despite dark omens, Elphaba spends her youth and early adulthood fighting for the vulnerable. She questions what it means to have a soul, to live morally, and to accept or deny her own nature as a sorceress. 
Yet her compassion and resistance prove futile.
Her sister dies in a tragic accident, the Animals she defends are captured and brutalized, and her lover, Fiyero, is killed by the Wizard’s secret police.
Grief and failure push her to a breaking point.
“I have fought fire with fire … and I ought to have done it sooner,” she tells her childhood friend Boq, who once believed her above such actions.
 
At the end, Elphaba stands in stark contrast to Dorothy, a purely moral character from another world who arrives only to offer an apology.
Yet even Dorothy, with her unshakable goodness, kills the Witch by accident.
Maguire’s novel leaves us with a haunting question: perhaps wickedness is not a matter of birth or destiny, but of circumstance, choice, and sheer bad luck. 
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