Freshman year of high school, I got the Wicked cast album for my birthday. I also got book money, and because this was back in the day, I went to the Borders in my local mall and picked up the book of Wicked that weekend. So my order of exposure was album, book, actual show. I liked the music a whole hell of a lot, I still do, but I am sometimes a spectacular cynic and also I just loved the book because it was dark and sort of screwed up, so the way the show’s plot goes still makes me a little cranky sometimes. Feelsy, but cranky.
I should clarify, too, that I have pretty much always hated The Wizard of Oz. I owned an old VHS of it when I was a kid, but I’m pretty sure it was a gift, and I really don’t care. I always sort of despised Dorothy, and I just didn’t give a damn about anyone else, really. I had a very difficult time connecting to male characters when I was a child, shock though that may be, so if I didn’t like the female characters, I had a hard time caring at all. Glinda was pouffy and pink, so that was cool when I was six, but she was kind of chipper and flat; now I look back and she is absolutely not a good person at all in the original. And the Witch was just cackly and flat, because movies back them were very cut and dry This Is The Bad Person, They Will Have No Redeeming Qualities. So that wasn’t going to happen.
Wicked was somewhat of a revelation for me: the way that Gregory Maguire wrote the Witch, wrote Elphaba, made me sort of adore her. Not necessarily in the pure, unadulterated, I-am-there-with-you-forever way that I fall for some fictional characters, but definitely in a pretty serious way. This was a character who was complex, screwed up, intricate, intelligent, screwed up (twice for good measure). I didn’t hate G(a)linda either. I sort of pitied Nessarose at first, then I hated her a little, but for valid reasons, which just completely stinks, because I happened to think (and still somewhat do) that Nessarose is a ridiculously beautiful name, but I can’t name things after people I hate.
Some of my friends borrowed it, borrowed the album; I have mentioned before that Wicked was sort of a thing for us in the high school years, yes. (Some preferred the stage version, some preferred the book. All of us indulged in both.) I may or may not have a terrible tiny camcordered tape of a friend and I, me in black, her in pink, waving frilly pens at each other and lip syncing various of the songs. We were like that. My mom read the entire book one Thanksgiving weekend while my friends and I decorated the Christmas tree, eyes wide as she turned pages compulsively; these books have always been an “us” thing, too.
I’m glad I didn’t have to wait so very many years for Son of a Witch; anyone who read Wicked when it was first published would have had to, but me being the late bloomer I was, I had it pretty easy. I didn’t really have a whole lot of feelings feelings about the book, though I found it interesting; I continue to love that Liir was written bisexual, I thought it was an adventure of a read, I still remember lending it to my mother when I was done and watching her sit there reading the ending and getting to the last page and just crying her eyes out. (My mother can actually cry at fiction, which I envy sometimes.)
I had even fewer actual feelings about A Lion Among Men, though I found it interesting enough too, but then we heard tell of the release of the fourth book in the series, Out of Oz. Allegedly it’s the last of them, which I understand; Gregory Maguire’s Oz is ridiculously expansive, politically intriguing, but I think it’s wrapped up neatly enough with this book.
This one follows the adventures of Elphaba’s granddaughter, Rain, daughter of Liir and Candle; there are still a few pretty significant questions I have about certain things, some of them involving Glinda, some of them involving Rain herself, but it was a very proper conclusion. I have never really been one of the shippers of Elphaba/Glinda, but I had a few inklings of it here, and also… things I won’t say for spoilers, but yes, Gregory Maguire and gender, sometimes I do greatly approve. I love that the Dorothy of Maguire’s Oz just walks around singing and everyone goes “whaaat?”
I can’t actually say too much about the plot of Out of Oz without being a spoilery deathfest. Even saying the word deathfest is maybe too spoilery, but I really would recommend it. I think it’s my second-favorite of the series, favorite of the sequels, and it’s fascinating to say the least. A very good end to a significant chapter of my literary life.
–your fangirl heroine.
partlydrawn 