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Women's Fiction
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

List Price: $15.00
Your Price: $10.20
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An experiment in how life unfolds
Review: Last night I finished reading Wicked, which was quite wonderful, and much more than I expected. After a friend gave it to me years ago, I never managed to pick it up because I thought it would be 400 pages of fluffy fairy tale. Actually, it's gloriously moody, brilliantly political, completely engrossing, and surprisingly sexy. Elphaba is one of literature's great outcasts, and Maguire fills his pages with too many valuable thoughts on the course of a life to read it just once. I've no doubt it's meaning will change for me if i read it again in five years, as any "classic" work should. I couldn't recommend it more.

While almost every quote about the book will hail it as an intelligent discussion of the nature of evil, I think that was almost a side of effect of telling Maguire's story. Any dependable post-modern yarn would be sure that we saw all angles of interpretation, and, really, I think his point is more about the tragedy of each and every human life. In our youthful confusion, do we inadvertently destroy ourselves later in life? Is seeking forgiveness for our wickedness destined to ruin us?

It's distressing to me that some people on Amazon deride the novel for the very reasons I hold it in such high esteem - its moral complexity and political nature. If you're looking for fluff, I think the Wicked, the musical, would be more appropriate. Maguire's Oz is a hard place to live in, a world of magic and fantasy where those things did little to eleviate the troubling political, social, and even meteorological conditions; the shoes could help Nessarose stand on her own two feet, but not save her from a cruelly displaced house. We are forced into admitting that sometimes "evil" is the only acceptable course of action, after having it precipitated upon us. On stage, Oz appears to be more supportive of outcasts, the politics more annoying than outrageous, and wickedness manageable for children 8 and up.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Wicked
Review: I think this book is a must read for everyone. The only thing I did not like about it is how Dorothy does not enter the story until the end and only has a very small amout of interaction with the witch until she dies. I think this could have been developed more thouroughly, however I do reccomend the book to everyone.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great fun!
Review: I wish I could get the person who said they were going to throw their book away to mail it to me! I am a high school librarian. Several of my teacher friends and I have had the best time reading this jewel and comparing our notes. We laugh, and believe it or not, compare what is done or said in the book to current culture. We are planning a road trip to NY right after school is out to see the musical. I think possibly those who can't appreciate it are not creative thinkers?

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Wickedly Good
Review: I thought this book was fabulous. I think this is a great book for anyone to read. I know most people think that by the short amount of info on the back of this book, it probably just the wicked witch's version of 'Wizard of Oz.' It really is much more. It makes you think about the story, because it someone else's view of it.

It starts with the birth of the Wicked Witch, who was named Elphaba. She had scary teeth and was born green, but you find why in the end of the book. Elphaba is allergic to water.

Then her mother doesn't know what to do, so she gets her old Nanny to help her. When Elphaba's mother finds out is she pregnant again she scared it will turn out like Elphaba. It doesn't, but the baby had no arms and is crippled. Her sister becomes the Wicked Witch of the East.

Then Elphaba goes to Shiz, which is a school. The headmistress, Madame Morrible makes her Galinda roomate. Galinda becomes Glida. Elphaba has some fun there, then her sister comes. Elphaba leaves the school and goes on to do different things.

Not that much happens until Dorothy comes to Oz. Then the Witch trys to get the shoes back from Dorothy. But she doesn't get them and she dies.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Stuck In Between...
Review: I, along with a lot of the other reviewers, am a huge Oz fan and was very excited by the idea of this book. It started with the uber-cool picture of the witch on the cover, with her animals and continued when I read the back flap. I started reading it in the summer of 2002 and got maybe twenty pages into it and just put it away, I really was bogged down with the lengthy descriptions and nearly impossible names to pronounce.

Fast forward two years, to January of '04. I had heard about the musical on Broadway and was anxious to pick up the soundtrack. From the minute I put it in, I was hooked. The music was just great and it told an interesting tale. So there I was again, staring down my copy of the novel in my bookshelf. So I picked it up and began reading it. It was a difficult one to get through but with each revelation I came upon I was so excited. The author did an astoundingly good job with the historical accuracy to the L. Frank Baum books and the film version. Something to notice is the conflicting colors of Dorothys shoes in the film version and the books. They are ruby red in the film and silver in the books and what Maguire did made me page through to check myself, but it was cool. He never mentioned the color of the shoes, just went into their powers and I thought that was unique. All in all, a great book and I think it was a fun view of a great story.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Spellbinding
Review: I am astounded at the number of reviewers here that have breezily put down this exquisite and fascinating tale. Maguire has made the Wicked Witch into a multidimensional character quite unlike what we remember from the film.

Potential readers, don't listen to the naysayers here. If you're the kind of person that has an appreciation for good *writing* and have an attention span that allows you to be interested in something for longer than the duration of a sitcom, chances are you will be enthralled with this novel.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Wickedly frustrating
Review: Like some of the other reviewers I thought this was one heck of a premise and I was very anxious to read the book, especially in light of the musical running on Broadway. What a disappointment. Usually books of this nature tend to start slow and end up closing with a fury. This one is just the opposite. After a very interesting first half, the second half just goes absolutely nowhere. It's boring and repetitive.

Gregory Maguire seems to be going for something between science-fiction and fantasy and he succeeds a little. He's painstakingly re-created a land of Oz from the Baum books that rivals that of Tolkien's Middle Earth and is filled with tremendous detail, but all he ends up with a haphazard narrative that doesn't really do anything to engage the reader, let alone expand so profoundly on the nature of evil, as the book tends to promise. It is intriguing to more or less switch the roles of the Wicked Witch of the West and the Wizard so that she is the "good guy" and he is the "bad guy", but there are literally dozens of hints, dropped none too subtly I might add, that seem like they are building up to a grand revelation or significant plot point and it ends up being nothing. Maguire seems caught in that trap where alluding to something often enough means the reader automatically gets it, through osmosis I guess. I thought this was particularly annoying, especially because he managed to re-capture my interest with one particular plot point involving the Wizard (I won't give it away) and then just let it go. It was never resolved.

The book is filled with passages like that. Great amounts of time and space are given to things which, from these allocations, must mean they are important but then they practically become afterthoughts or footnotes. The entire middle section of the book (in my copy from page 200 to about page 300) is more or less a tangent that did absolutely nothing for me. I persevered because, knowing the original story so well as so many of us do, I was interested to see how Maguire would tie in the action from when Dorothy lands in Oz. Some of the ways in which Maguire made the connections were interesting, but not enough to satisfy me.

Unfortunately, Wicked falls into the category of a great idea gone badly wrong.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Very creative and enjoyable
Review: I think the concept of this book is facinating. Maguire creates a whole new cast of characters to help explain how someone might become a "wicked witch". He humanizes the players of the story and brings a fresh and creative new perspective to a classic story. It is a bit long but if someone was telling the tale of your life, wouldn't you hope for something over 100 pages? I thought is was very enjoyable and a great vacation read.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Too Bad...
Review: I loved the "idea" of this book, and after trudging through the beginning, was finally pulled along by some really clever writing...but man o man after "Shiz," it was sluggish and I, unlike the reader who didn't want it to end, could not believe I was still turning pages and the damned thing wouldn't! The same story could have been written in half the words. And it could have been tighter. We still never understood who exactly Yackle was, whether Grommetik murdered the Goat, if Fiyero was still alive. And we were left in the cold with undeveloped characters like Nor and Liir and even Glinda. There were so many questions and allusions that kept me reading in hopes of some resolution, long after I was ready to call it quits. But they were never answered! In sum, this story was like a sieve, the good and the bad all mixed together but in the end falling through the holes like so much sand.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: If you like Jerry Springer then you will love this book
Review: On the basis that there is a grain of truth to every myth this author applied that truism to a well-known fictional character. In doing so he went perhaps a bit too far. Everything that was enchanting about Oz became perverse. Characters took on opposite personalities, and became guilty of every petty motive or moral debauchery possible. The author seems to have exploited every sleazy device to tell this story; rape, adultery, murder, manipulative personalities, animal cruelty, social snobbery, political machinations, and on and on. The story went on forever and became more and more depressing.
This story, like others by Maguire, is dense with interweaving plots, too many characters and events, some of which are never fully explained so the significance to the story is questionable. The result is convoluted, sluggish and self-absorbed. I don't recommend this book at all.


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