sydneygoodness 's review for:

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

2.0

---

i could have enjoyed this in a vacuum i think, but along with the rest of everyone who read this post- musical (and especially post part one of the film), wicked benefitted hugely by being adapted by people who are better writers. could be a fun-ish queer coming of age in a weird fantasy world, if dorothy gale didn’t appear 87% of the way through (not including the prologue, where the scarecrow calls elphaba gay). the most interesting parts of the story are confined to glimpses from other point of views, elphaba spends most of her pov feeling intense religious guilt and shame, and also only does magic like a single time when doing unethical frankensteinian experiments on her flying monkeys.

however, i will say. the glinda x elphaba content was really awesome and it’s heavily implied that glinda is a lesbian who got brainwashed into liking men and marrying her rich old husband (NOT jonathan bailey) by madame morrible. they also kiss when they split up in emerald city. so i’m holding space for that but i would never ever recommend someone else read this unless they were experiencing the same sort of brain rot that i am currently.


also the “ozdust ballroom” scene in the novel took place in “the philosophy club”, where boq is traumatized by watching a threesome including an anthropomorphic tiger. which cracked me up.