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.
Rating:
Summary: Smart Smart Smart
Review: Smart, Smart, Smart! Dialogue - Smart, Ideas - Smart, Characters - Smart! The book is the story of "The Wizard of Oz" but written to expand on the setting that Dorothy was plopped into. When we watch the movie, the Land of Oz magically appears as if it has always been what we first see. We learned through the movie that the wizard came to Oz, appeared in Oz at some point in history, but we aren't given an inkling of development of Oz and what the role of the Wizard was in that development. (Though we do know the wizard was a charlatan and a hoax, we aren't supposed to concentrate on that.) Each page of this book is a delight and a sorrow. It is a delight because I KNOW its true, everything finally clicks into place and I begin to understand how the events that transpired came to be. It is a sorrow because I recognize how blind I've always been, how I took the easy way by being blinded by the picture presented and not asking the right questions. And it is a sorrow because I recognize how many others have been persuaded by the marketing to view the story of Oz in a simple and terribly incorrect way. The book challenged me to question my other presumptions.
Rating:
Summary: You are not in Kansas Anymore
Review: Actually you are in a satirical version of Nazi Germany. At least that is what I read. Think of the wizard as Hitler and the animals of Oz as the Jews and you have a pretty good idea of where the book is going. There are programs to educate the young people of Oz that smacks of Hitler Youth, but it does not beat you over the head with analogy after analogy. It flows pretty well. We find that Elphaba is really not that wicked but is a revolutionary. She wants the red shoes back because the owner of the shoes will be recognized as the leader of Munchkinland, which has seceded from Oz. If the wizard has those shoes he will be able to march into Munchkinland and take over. Think Poland. The book is at its best in Elphaba's college years as we see her grow from an introvert, which you would be if you were green, into an educated political Animal. As the animals lose their rights, and begin to disappear, Elphaba becomes more of a real person, unlike the caricature from the original book and movie. She is a complex person and is actually easy to root for in her quest for justice. This is a pretty dark book and is for adults, not children. It is not quite Animal Farm or 1984, but is closer to them than I expected.
Rating:
Summary: A Classic
Review: Wicked gives a whole new perspective on the classic tale, "Wizard of Oz" I guess you could say its the other story. I was entranced by this book. I couldn't put it down. The first chapter is a bit slow, but if you stick with it, it just gets better and better.
Rating:
Summary: I'll Never Look At Wizard of Oz Again In The Same Light.....
Review: This book was wonderful, and sad, and certainly shed a different slant on all the characters: The Witch of the East, The Witch of the West, The Wizard, Dorothy, and the slippers. I ended up rooting for the Witch of the West and hating the Wizard! And poor Dorothy was just a pawn in it all. It will be hard for me to watch the classic movie The Wizard of Oz in the same light anymore. I'm ready to read more books by this author!
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