Having read and enjoyed Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, I picked up Gregory Maguire’s other retelling of a fairy story: Wicked, telling the behind-the-scenes story of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

If Oz is a wonderful childhood memory for you, you may not want to read this. This book takes Oz as a starting point and twists it so it is barely recognizable apart from the basic structure. The Wizard, it turns out, was a cruel and repressive dictator, while Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, was far more interested in science and politics than in sorcery.

The book is presented as an exploration of what it means to be evil, about the nature of evil. In fact the book does not say much interesting about evil at all. But if you ignore this false marketing and approach it simply as a story, the book is very well worth reading.

It’s the story of Elphaba’s life. And it’s not a very uplifting story. Oz is a dismal and dreary land, and Elphaba’s life is a tragedy more than an adventure. She has a harsh childhood (with her father a religious fanatic and her mother dead when Elphaba is only five years old) going on through a rebellious adolescence to stormy adulthood. She has a strong moral sense and great courage, but nevertheless she doesn’t succeed in changing any of the wrongs she sees around her. She leads a passionate but generally lonely life. As the years pass she comes to feel like a failure, becoming somewhat unbalanced, in the end probably slightly mad. And when Dorothy’s party of travellers comes along (and she is fully aware that they’re there to kill her) and cruelly slaughters her favourite dog, she goes over the edge.

Or maybe it’s really the story of her death? It’s not quite as obvious as getting to the end of the book and then seeing how all the pages, all the events before were leading up to that point. But to some extent it is like that. We know from the beginning that she will die, even how she will die, so we know where the story will end up.

Several reviewers complain that the book doesn’t have a plot, that characters come and go without warning, that story threads run out without being tidied up. There is no climax and no conclusion. That’s all factually correct but it didn’t bother me at all. This is Elphaba’s story; what happens to the other characters is only relevant to the extent it affects Elphaba’s life. And how many lives have a climax and a dramatic conclusion? Very few, I’d imagine. Instead we live, perhaps struggle to achieve something, until we die, one way or another.

Despite all this, I somehow didn’t find the book depressing. I thought it was a great story, imaginative and engaging, and well told. Well worth reading.

If you want more reviews, go here for a negative one and here for a positive one.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.