Wicked by Gregory Maguire

Wicked by Gregory Maguire

 

I've had this book on my shelf for quite a while. I bought the sequel Son of a Witch in a book sale earlier, and I didn't want to read that because I hadn't read this, so I ordered it from Amazon.

 

It still took me some time to get to this, but I'm so glad I finally did. This didn't look like a chunky book, but it is: 519 pages, and I enjoyed all of it.

 

There is a lot of depth and background to Maguire's Oz and the Wicked Witch of the West. You find out more about her, what made her a Wicked Witch, what's going on in Oz, and why things happened the way they did.

 

I've never actually read Frank L. Baum's The Wizard of Oz, but I've watched the movies and I've always felt that the character of the Witch was very one-dimensional.

 

Besides, I love retellings of classic stories and seeing them from a whole other perspective. The Wicked Witch of the West came really alive for me in Maguire's Wicked.

 

We already know that the Witch inevitably gets killed in the end by Dorothy, so I should've been able to accept it, but I found myself grieving for her, and feeling so sorry for all the things she went through her whole life.

 

The only thing that gave me hope was that there was a sequel. Perhaps her life wasn't in vain after all.