Rating: 
Summary: Interesting viewpoint
Review: I also asked for this book as a gift, wanting to read it before seeing the play next year. I def. agree with another reviewer when they say read this book within uniteruppted time. It's hard going back once the book is put down & I often had to re-read sections. It is also quite involved - no skimming is allowed! It is wonderful when a book like this emerges & skews our whole perspective on things, and the great reviews shows our willingness to accept the other side of the story.
And to the reviewer who was offended by the "gratuitous" sex, but is not a young teenager: since this book was purchased in the adult section, your parents should have expected adult writing and so should you. Your review was extremely naive -what did you expect - a fairy tale with a happy ending?????
Rating: 
Summary: Beware
Review: Although I find this book to be a very interesting one and am compelled to read it to the end because it is so different from the books I am used to I am forced to inform the general public of a few facts. I asked my parents for this book for christmas because I loved the idea of delving deeper into the seemingly half-cazed mind of the Wicked Witch of the West, however I only read some of the reviews, the short descriptions of the contents and some of the exerpt. If I had known the extent of the disgusting sexuality in this fantasy's contents I would not have read it first without my parents first perusing it and then warning me which pages to skip over. I am not a very young teenager, however I have strong values, and while reading what I thought was a very interesting book I was actually almost physically sick at one point and had to shut the book in disgust. I do like most of the book's deeper portrayal of the characters you think you know, but when reading certain passages, especially toward the center of the text I could not set my mind at ease until I had warned those others looking to read this book who are not fully prepared for its flagrent use of sexual inuendos and sensual situations to draw a very different kind of audience.
On the whole, the book possesses clever wit and amazingly interesting personalities and characters that both surprise you and intrigue you. I fell in love instantly with the green terror that is the Witch, and was happy with some changes that key characters took on. However I seriously hope that the next time Gregory Maguire writes a novel like this one, for I asume from what others have told me since I began reading this book that the others are similar in their use of sexuality, that the person or people who write the reviews or the brief descriptions of what the story contains tell the possible reader how much sex is involved and exacly how detailed the descriptions of it are.
Rating: 
Summary: Wicked awesome
Review: This book is amazing. I started reading it because I love anything having to do with The Wicked Witch of the West. After reading a few pages I was hooked. READ THIS BOOK. It's incredible. And now it's been made into a musical starring Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth. The Wicked Witch lives.
Rating:
Summary: Imagination and an open mind
Review: I have not even gotten half way through the book, and I think it is great. I have been reading the reviews, and I must say, If you have an imagination at all, If you love new ideas, and if you believe anything is possible in the world of imagination, then this is the book for you. It is fun and interesting, surprising, and strange. There are characters from Both the first Wizard of Oz movie, and the second, which most people never saw, but I thought was fun in a strange way.
If you want a book that doesn't stretch the limits of your imagination, or you are closeminded, boring and spend most of your time scoffing at anything new, I don't recomend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Spellbinding!
Review: What a wonderful work! Maguire kept me captivated from beginning to end. I was entirely caught up in the psyche of Elphaba, Galinda, Boq, Fiyero, and all the others. This book is a VERY intriguing look at a classic story.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but is trying too hard!
Review: I did enjoy reading this book. The characters are interesting, but the more interesting aspect is that the author gives the Land of Oz politics, culture, a higher education system, social mores, an economy, socio-economic class, and racism. It is a brilliant idea.However, it is not brilliantly executed. Maquire is trying too hard. Many of the philisophical debates on the nature of evil are pretentious and often redundant. What is worse, those debates ruin the flow of the story. Also, many of the character arc's are not fully developed and some of the characters disappear abruptly with no explaination. The most cloying part of the book is when Elphaba's friends go to a sex club where one of them (a young man who, out of nowhere, is described as being "effeminate"; clearly a reference to his sexuality) is raped on stage by a tiger. This scene serves no purpose other than to amuse the author. A better editor would have cut this entire scene. It was a fun read, though. I did enjoy it and was sad when Elphaba died. I also liked the epilogue in which Dorothy was thought to have lied about how and why she killed the witch. I think Maquire is a bit over rated as a writer, though. He is great at coming up with creative ways to retell familiar fantasy stories, but he is not very good at fully realizing those retellings.
Rating: 
Summary: Wickedly Boring
Review: I was disappointed in this book! It reminded me of the semester at Indiana University in which we spent the entire class discussing James Joyce's ULYSSES--and nothing else! This book seems forced and overly thematic. The struggle between good and evil is inflated, and I finished the book with heavy lids. Not recommended!
Rating:
Summary: Wickedly good
Review: This enjoyable, rambling novel is written so engagingly that it's easy to overlook the occasionally forced-seeming accommodation of some of L. Frank Baum's ideas (for example, the poorly explained concept of sentient Animals in a story that in many other ways scrupulously establishes verisimilitude). But the source is treated with wit, too: Maguire says he fashioned the title character's name, Elphaba, from the L-F-B of L. Frank Baum. One of the reasons I liked Maguire's story so much is that it describes a country of varied terrains and cultures in detail and has a good map -- much like Earthsea and Middle Earth and Narnia. It motivated me to order a copy of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, a compendium of more than 1,000 imagined places in world literature from way back when to Harry Potter. I also liked the fact that so many of Maguire's characters have intelligent conversations about meaningful subjects -- not always a given in fantasy novels. Here, the characters' educated discourse brings several of them vividly to life, enabling the reader to interact with them both intellectually and emotionally. Elphaba is an unexpectedly ineffective character in the end, with great convictions that come to naught in the public realm, but the novel shows, rather movingly I think, how politics affect everyone's life, whether you are politically minded or not. Maguire didn't quite convince me that magic could be so incidental in daily life in his Oz -- I expected it would be more integrated and integral, rather than an "extra" the way it comes across as being. But maybe there's a point here, too; namely, that a mechanistic (political) view of the world sends magic (however you define it) underground. And yet Madame Morrible used spells to coerce others. Is she the exception that proves the rule? The perversion of a special gift? I was surprised that Maguire chose to keep Baum's conceit of the Wizard and Dorothy coming from another world, when his political plot could easily have made Dorothy an Ozian assassin in the employ of the Wizard. That's one of the ways he seems to have deliberately chosen to keep his story rooted in Baum's book. Overall, he took on a tough challenge and carried it off with great imagination and sheer storytelling skill.
Rating:
Summary: a nice new take on a classic
Review: What Maguire tries to do here is give us a different perspective on L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz. Maguire tells the story from the Wicked Witch's point of view. Here we see a more sympathetic witch, one who is not a bad person, but has had her life take same bad turns. In this Dorothy and her crew are a bit more...well, wrong. It's an interesting idea that Maguire has turned into a good story.
Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: I love to read and eagerly anticipated this book. However, I was very disappointed and only read about 1/5 of the book. I could have kept going despite its dry tone and uninteresting characters, but the frequent sexual innuendos ruined the book. The sexual references were frequent, and they were crass and unpleasant. I would not recommend this book despite its broadway fame.
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