I hadn't reread Wicked since it was published ten years ago, and I'm happy to find that it's just as good as I'd remembered it.
Wicked is a prequel of sorts to The Wizard of Oz, giving us the life story of the Wicked Witch of the West, who is named Elphaba (a name derived by Maguire from L. Frank Baum's initials). We follow her through a difficult childhood (everyone is shocked when she is born green); her college education at Shiz, where she meets Glinda; and her transformation into a politically aware anti-Wizard activist. Dorothy and company show up only at the very end (and as far as I'm concerned, the less Dorothy, the better), and we finally learn exactly why Elphaba is so determined to get back her sister's red shoes.
It's a fabulous book, and Elphaba is one of the great fictional characters of the last decade. She's prickly, difficult to deal with, and uncompromising, but fiercely loyal to her friends and her causes; her relationship with Glinda is one of the best portraits of friendship I know.
It's not surprising that the Elphaba-Glinda relationship became the focus of the musical adaptation; Glinda is elevated to a co-star in the musical, and huge chunks of Maguire's novel are abandoned entirely. That's not a criticism; it is the nature of adaptation, and the musical that was fashioned out of Wicked is a fine piece of entertainment.
Son of a Witch is most definitely a sequel to Wicked, the novel; anyone coming to it knowing only the musical will be quite confused. The central character of the new book doesn't even exist in the musical.
That character is Liir, who we last saw cowering in fear as Elphaba was killed; he had been traveling with her for as long as he can remember, and he may be -- no one is quite sure, even Elphaba -- her son. As Son of a Witch opens, it's some ten years later, and Liir is found by a group of travelers in a gully, where he's been left for dead. He is taken to the Cloister of Saint Glinda to recover, which turns out to be one of the places he and Elphaba had lived for a time.
One of the cloister's young novices, Candle, is tasked with tending to him, and as she helps him to recover his health, Maguire flashes back through Liir's adolescence, showing us how he reached this point.
Like Wicked, Son of a Witch is concerned with destiny, with how we respond to others' perception of us, and with the nature of good and evil. The new book is interesting; if it doesn't quite rise to the level of Wicked, well, very few books do.
At the heart of the problem is that Liir simply isn't as interesting a character as Elphaba was; for most of the book, he's an indecisive, passive character. The book does pick up steam at the end when Liir finally realizes that adulthood means making choices and taking responsibility. But even if Liir is a bit flat, Maguire's Oz is a marvelous place to visit, and his notions about the political realities of life there are intriguing.
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