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

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, is a parallel novel by Gregory Maguire. Based upon the writings of L. Frank Baum, it is a revisionist look at the land and characters of Oz, best known from Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Wicked, published in 1995 with illustrations by Douglas Smith, presents events, characters and situations from Baum’s books and the film in new and surprising ways. The events described in the book rarely contradict anything from the original story, and some detailed events come directly from Baum’s book. However, Wicked gives Oz and its inhabitants a new context, which often changes or inverts the meaning suggested by the original texts. - Wikipedia

Book Review by David G
Grade 8 English
Bigelow Middle School, MA

Wicked, The Plot in a Nutshell

In Wicked, Gregory Maguire takes, “The Wizard of Oz,” a fairy tale so deeply engrained in our cultural memory that many of us could recite it in our sleep, and turns it 180 degrees on its head, making the Wicked Witch of the East a religious fanatic, the Wizard an evil tyrant and the Wicked Witch of the West a misunderstood outcast who only wants to, “Do no harm in this world.”

This fractured tale begins in Munchkinland, where Melena and Frexspar, two missionaries, give birth to a little green girl named Elphaba, instantly shunned for her odd coloring and eerie nature. Elphaba’s childhood is anything but normal, as a parade of zany characters march into her life, from her mother’s headstrong nanny to an exotic glassblower both of her parents love.

The childhood section of Wicked ends abruptly with Melena conceiving once again, and the story picks up roughly 17 years later with Elphaba all grown up and attending Shiz University, Oz’s most prestigious college, where she is paired up to room with Glinda, a social-climbing sorceress. The two girls soon become the unlikeliest of best friends and form a social circle whose antics take up most of Elphaba’s college days. But not all is well in Oz, where the Animals, talking animals with human souls, are being scapegoated by the manipulative Wizard, in a stunning metaphor to Nazi Germany. Elphaba soon realizes that Animal Rights are her life’s calling, and embarks on a journey to speak to the Wizard himself.

Through the plot’s often unexpected twists and turns, we witness how Elphaba becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, and, in the last chapter, come face to face with some of our favorite characters from the classic film.

Maguire’s Wicked, Pros and Cons

Maguire’s inclination to turn a well-known story into a new, multi-faceted work of literature is ingenious, and seeing such well-known characters’ other sides is fascinating, although at some points I found myself thinking, “Who is this author to take such a masterpiece and make it his own?” Especially irritating was Maguire’s desire to explain every little detail of the original story and then leaving out important backstories, such as who the Tin Man and Scarecrow really are.

That being said, Maguire’s Oz has no humor, no wit and is instead a bleak landscape of human failures and inevitable evils. Maguire makes some interesting observations on human nature, but the novel’s failure to laugh at itself makes these statements utterly ridiculous. After all, how can you take any deep message seriously when it’s being said by Glinda the Good? Just a dash of tongue-in-cheek comedy could have saved this book from the moralizing wreck it ended up becoming.

In the end, it is good to see such beloved childhood characters again, but it’s hard to enjoy seeing them when they seem like nothing more than filler in an extended essay on philosophy.

Grade: C-

External Links

• Wicked at Wikipedia
• Author’s Page

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