This is the second book by Gregory McGuire I have read. I tried Mirror Mirror in high school and didn't care for it. This book was highly recommended by several of my friends, so I reluctantly gave it a try. I remain unimpressed. McGuire mixes in poorly developed political strife and intrigue with overuse of words like "cock," and people call him brilliant. He's not. His writing ends up being pretentious, boring, and at times pointlessly crude and offensive. Yes, the alternative fairy tale is a fun idea, but my suggestion is to try Mercedes Lackey or Robin Mckinley, but stay away from McGuire. ( )

Hah! Finished! And it's going straight to Bookmooch.

Wicked: if you were thinking of reading it, don't bother. And if you've seen the musical, especially don't bother - there is no resemblance other than some names as far as I can tell, and it would probably offend you.

This book is... I don't even know where to start. This probably won't be a very coherent post.

My first and foremost complaint is the explicit content - totally gratuitous, adds nothing to the plot, and jumps out at you when you least expect it. Stop it! I hate that. There were points where I was on the verge of giving up every few pages.

It's inconsistently written. It's split into several distinct parts, and each one reads like it was written by a different author. The Shiz university section was the most coherent and readable, the rest was generally meandering and confusing. Plot lines makes no sense, characters' actions make no sense, and most of all, characters speech is completely random and makes no sense, especially towards the latter parts. It's a bit like the author had a big bag of actions and phrases and just reached in, pulled out stuff, and stuck it together at random.

The structure runs something like this:

Early years: weird, explicit
Shiz: readable, except for the gross explicit
Emerald City: random, slow
Vinkus: random, deathly slow, mostly pointless
Last few chapters: QuickFinishItNowWe'veGotToPublishTomorrow! Utterly inconsistent.

I liked Fiyero a little bit, but he has no characterisation at all. I actually like Elphaba a lot, which is part of why I'm so annoyed with this book. I feel offended on her behalf that her story was written like this! If I could write, I'd want to write the book again to do her justice. The other characters we're uniformly un-endearing.

It could have been done so much better. ( )

What an epic! I picked this book up after I had heard the musical soundtrack. The musical is lovely, but does not do this book justice. If you liked the musical, this book will take you twice as deep into their world. It is dark and a very good read. ( )

Wow! There is so much involved in Wicked. There is quite obviously a politcal theme to the book. Maguire explores several other themes as well: Good vs. Evil, Predestination vs. Free Will, Religion, Magic, Relationships, and the list goes on. It is a fantastic, thought provoking epic. ( )

I loved this & thought it was alot of fun..very entertaining & funny!!! Who would've thought..a book about the life of the Wicked Witch! She actually had friends? WOW! :) ( )

This is great! I love this fresh take on things. it won me over right away.

Excellent tale. ( )

Gregory Maguire, with his work Wicked, really put himself into the limelight. Of course, in this instance, his protagonist Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, really puts the "lime" in limelight.

That is, to say, she's green.

Maguire, following past success as a children's author, took one of the most beloved children's books and made it real, focusing on the misunderstood Elphaba, and how she became so wicked in the first place. This also firmly placed him in the caste of "parallel novelist," in which most, if not all, of his general works to date have been heavily inspired by previous works of beloved fiction.

Wicked does a role reversal of the expected characterizations of Oz. We're to root for the bad guy, who really isn't all that bad; she just doesn't appreciate the oppressive government of Oz, especially as it treats animals and Animals (that is, animals gifted with speech) the same, though one is clearly capable of rational thought.

Maguire's Oz is real, grizzled, gritty, and nothing like the happy magic land Baum made it out to be. If you find Oz to be sacrosanct, you may wish to avoid this one. But, if you enjoy Oz, and wish to see more work inspired by it, then this is definitely a book for you. Since it's publication, Maguire has written two other novels to follow in this parallel storyline, which may also be worth reading when you're done being Wicked. ( )

This book was the worst. If you like books written by misogynists (if every female character in the book is either a b**** or a dope then I'm guessing that Maguire hates women) who are into freaky sex scenes, then by all means read this book. The premise is great, but yuck, the characters are horrible and story just draaaaaags. ( )

My only previous exposure to Oz is in the form of movies (the Judy Garland classic as well as "The Wiz" and "Return to Oz"), so there was probably a lot of irony in this story that was completely lost on me. All the same, I enjoyed it. Its assertion that evil is in the eye of the beholder (and the writer of history) was striking. The ending was a bit rushed, and the author did not offer quite as many explanations as I would have liked (such as *why* she was making winged monkeys), but all in all it was a good book. Now I want to read Maguire's other fairy tales from the bad guy's point of view. ( )

The premise was clever but what a clunker of a book. I enjoyed some of the imagery. Yet, it was as if the author sat around with a group of friends late one night and said, "What if we made the wizard Elphaba's father?" and "We have to make her a hermaphrodite." The beginning of the book had me engrossed. The middle (college years) dragged. The end was just plain silly. And yes, before I forget, the political and religious talk was preachy and quite uninteresting. ( )

I really enjoyed this book, but it does all kind of start slipping once Dorothy gets involved. It feels like he just didn't know how to incorporate the actual events of the original tale. Not sure I will read any of his other books though - he seems to have worked himself into a really constricted niche. ( )

I saw Wicked the musical which got me curious about the book. With the exception of character names and a few events, the two are nothing alike. Do not read this book expecting to have the same experience as you did with the musical.

That said, I enjoyed the book. It's well written and imaginative. It is not the Oz you may remember from the movie or Baum's books. This book is also very adult oriented and not for children. There are parts that are slow going and I got tired of the overly political themes part way through. ( )

Reviewed by K. Osborn Sullivan for TeensReadToo.com

Have you ever read a popular book and wondered why it was so popular? That's exactly how I felt as I worked my way through WICKED. Actually, that's not entirely true. I know why it's a New York Times Bestseller. Part of it has to do with the reason I picked the book up in the first place. I expected a light, fairy tale-like story. It's based on a children's book. There's a Broadway musical about it. Sounds like it should be fun, right? Uh, not quite. I get the feeling, though, that a lot of people thought as I did and bought WICKED looking for an easy-to-read lead-up to THE WIZARD OF OZ. I wonder how many of them finished reading the book when they figured out the truth?

Although to be fair, WICKED doubtless also owes some of its popularity to the fact that it's a well-written, literary novel that can be appreciated by well-read, literary-type people. Unfortunately, I'm really not one of those. Giving me a piece of deep, meaningful literature is like giving a copy of Hemingway's THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA to a manatee. In other words, I was disappointed. My disappointment was partly in the book for not fulfilling my expectations, and partly in myself for not being able to appreciate a quality literary effort.

In case you've been living in a hollowed out tree for the last couple of years and haven't heard about the play, WICKED is the story of the Wicked Witch of the West and how she became the Wicked Witch of the West. The book delves far deeper into the witch's life and times than any musical could in only two hours, however. In the book version of WICKED, readers are introduced to the witch, whose real name is Elphaba, when she is first born. She's green and has dangerous, pointy teeth. Needless to say, she's not too popular with the other children. Even her parents aren't too sure about her.

As the story progresses, we see Elphaba at college. She falls in with a number of fellow students, some of whom are more and others less accepting of the strange green girl. It's not just her skin color that's different, though. Elphaba thinks and acts differently than other people. And she has this aversion to water.... Well, we all know how that turns out for her.

The book is an interesting departure from the Oz books, including such details as why the Cowardly Lion is able to talk, and the fact that everyone in Oz thought Dorothy's dog, Toto, was the most irritating thing to ever draw breath. I wish, however, that I could have liked some of the characters. No one was particularly likeable, as far as I was concerned. Even Elphaba, who readers should have had some sympathy for, seemed odd to me, and I never understood her motivation for anything she did. In other words, I could have gotten over the fact that she was green, but it really bothered me that she didn't act normal. Also, a word of warning: Even though these are essentially fairy tale characters, this book treats them like adults, complete with sex, swearing, and the occasional murder. Younger readers should steer clear, and older readers should be aware of what's in store here.

In general, I recommend this book for OLDER readers who are huge fans of the Oz books or the Wicked play and want to go deeper. According to my husband, who is capable of appreciating fine literature, it also has literary merit. But for those of us who want to keep our memories of the Oz stories as sweet as the old Judy Garland film was, those readers might want to be careful around WICKED. ( )

On the plus side, the book was imaginative, clever, occasionally insightful. For me, however, the negatives--banal introspectives on morality, extremely slow pacing, tortuous plot twists that seem to go nowhere at all--far outweighed any other value the book may have offered. I finished it (barely) but would not recommend it. ( )

I enjoyed the concept of this book - I enjoyed where it was going in parts - but generally speaking it was a little slow, with a lot of unresolved plot. It seemed at times like that might have been the point, but personally it just tended to frustrate me. ( )

I enjoyed this book - perhaps more so because I did not have any particular expectations of what it would be like. I was curious - I have not read any Frank L Baum, only saw the usual film as a child - and I always like to hear "the other" side of any kind of polarized story.

I read this book in fits and starts in the slow/"waiting" patches of my day, and I found the structure of the book very conducive to that. Chapters vary in length, but they are nearly always broken up into much smaller segments by a little witch graphic, and the story rushes off to another group of characters or place or time. This is "the life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West", and it does read like that. I enjoyed this way of telling the story. I don't know if this book has ever been serialized in print, but I think it could be quite good that way too.

This is a fairy tale - in the sense of fairy tales where the fairies are from Faerie and so are not sugar coated, are tricksters and powerful, sometimes amoral, characters with long memories. I enjoyed seeing Oz with real social concerns; political upheaval; economic problems; protest; debates (or lack of) about science and religion, and about education and discrimination. Oz actually felt more convincing as a place with the addition of social and political themes - but there were still enough fantastical elements to make it magical, a bit escapist and fun, and somewhat otherworldly. I liked the fact that there was still a lot of mystery and magic; that not everything was explained away and dissected, leaving the reader without illusions.

I particularly enjoyed the myth making within the story itself. Early on in the book, there are a number of creation myths, and by the end, Elphaba has merged with one of these. Elphaba is born green and with an aversion to water. It seemed to me that it was implied this is the result of a "Miracle Elixir" drunk by her mother, which also gave her mother strange dreams of another place. (This place has relevance to a certain book, and one other character in the story.) Elphaba is brought up, socialised and schooled, and is not much good at sorcery. In fact, her friend Glinda is really the one with the magical talent. Elphaba investigates things and learns about scientific experiments, becomes political, and finds she has to hide her work to avoid arrest by the government. In her travels she learns of various mysteries, befriends creatures, and conducts experiments. It seemed to me that the further she travelled from centres of science and education, and the less social she was, the more mythologized and feared she became. Travel, rumour and minimal understanding on the part of others turned an isolated, somewhat secretive investigator and political agitator, into a witch of myth and legend. In an odd way, it seemed like Elphaba's reactions to others' expectations and reactions, began to give tiny grains of truth to the big mythical archetype she was reputed to be.

For me the least round characters were those of Dorothy and her friends, who are mentioned, but do not actually appear in person until quite near the end of the book.

All in all, a good read but not a particularly light one. ( )

"Wicked" is the story of the wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz books from her birth to her death. Divided into five sections, the book focuses on certain times in Elphaba's life: her early childhood; her college years; her political activism and her doomed love affair; her becoming a "witch"; and her final descent into madness and her accidental murder by Dorothy.

Gregory Maguire has clearly not only seen "The Wizard of Oz" movie but read several of the books. Minor characters in "The Wizard of Oz" book, such as Boq, become major characters. There are nods to other characters in later Oz books such as the Tiktok man. He makes some interesting changes though. Glinda, the good Witch of the North, is the most surprising character as Maguire portrays her as vain, shallow, and, unlike in Baum's book, a good friend to Elphie. The Wizard, a humbug in the Oz novel and movie, is evil and manipulative. Animals, much loved and respected in the books, are separated into Animals (talking) and animals (non-talking) and are discriminated against.

"Wicked" is both a success and failure. The book succeeds at making Elphaba, the Wicked Witch, a sympathetic character, even as she is having an adulterous affair and engaging in terrorism. Her ill-fated love affair makes her especially sympathetic. Readers may protest at the dark way Maguire portrays the Land of Oz, but reading "Wicked" makes you realize that underneath the surface of L. Frank Baum's fairy-tale, Oz is filled with danger and evil characters.

Where Maguire fails is explaining how a basically sympathetic character like Elphaba becomes regarded as a witch and feared by all. He gamely tries to explain how she got all her props and why she sends them to Dorothy: such as the bees (he never explains how she can talk to them); her wolves (dogs sent to guide Dorothy to the castle); and the winged monkeys (he tries to explain how they got their wings, but it doesn't work). The magic cap is regrettably left out. And while Elphie's aversion to water is mentioned throughout the entire book, it is never explained why she is allergic to water. Her final descent into total madness feels rushed and not quite believable.

"Wicked" is an interesting, if unsettling read for Wizard of Oz fans. Parents should be aware that there are multiple sexual themes that make this book unsuitable for children. ( )

I thought this book was immensely enjoyable right up to the last section. Until then, it had been wonderfully deep and imaginative, and I was immersed in the storyline, having developed sympathy for the main character. Then suddenly, the author shifted his style and rushed through the last section, leaving many questions unanswered and many promises unfulfilled. It was almost as if the publisher came to him and said, "Hey, hurry up and finish this book, we need to get it to press!" And so he did. ( )

I read it ages ago, so I don't remember as much as I would like, but I've been dying to see the musical since it came out. The book was unexpected and great. ( )

Wicked to read in the literal sense....this was a terrible book to read. It was not only boring and uneventful and it was politically draining that I felt I was watching CNN argue over the presidential debate! BORING, BORING, BORING! Don't bother reading it, Elphaba dies on page 402 and the book ends on page 406. It would have been a better book if it was less political and if it tied into the Wizard of Oz story rather than replace it in the last 15-20 pages of the book. This was a disappointment to read. ( )

I've read almost all of Gregory Maguire's books (at least those meant for non-children readers). And Wicked is by far my favorite. I fell in love with this book the first time I read it. It's a fabulous re-telling of the Wizard of Oz from the Wicked Witch's point of view... only Elphaba isn't really wicked, and the reader starts to identify with her and her difficult life. If you like fairy tales with a twist, you must read this book. ( )

http://olvasonaplo.freeblog.hu/archiv... ( )

Strange and surreal. Clever, witty, fantastical. Somewhat political/social justice issues. Enjoyed it, but took awhile as it's quite dark. Not quite ready to read the sequel yet, but hope to eventually. ( )

Confusing, but fun idea. ( )