Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked Years Series #1)|Paperback (original) (raw)

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The novel that sparked the inimitable Broadway show. A fractured fairytale (with a ton of heart) where the world of Oz is flipped on its head. Read in awe as Maguire single-handedly changes the reputation of the most wicked witch in literature.

The New York Times bestseller and basis for the Tony-winning hit musical, soon to be a major motion picture starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande

With millions of copies in print around the world, Gregory Maguire’s Wicked is established not only as a commentary on our time but as a novel to revisit for years to come. Wicked relishes the inspired inventions of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, while playing sleight of hand with our collective memories of the 1939 MGM film starring Margaret Hamilton (and Judy Garland). In this fast-paced, fantastically real, and supremely entertaining novel, Maguire has populated the largely unknown world of Oz with the power of his own imagination.

Years before Dorothy and her dog crash-land, another little girl makes her presence known in Oz. This girl, Elphaba, is born with emerald-green skin—no easy burden in a land as mean and poor as Oz, where superstition and magic are not strong enough to explain or overcome the natural disasters of flood and famine. Still, Elphaba is smart, and by the time she enters Shiz University, she becomes a member of a charmed circle of Oz’s most promising young citizens.

But Elphaba’s Oz is no utopia. The Wizard’s secret police are everywhere. Animals—those creatures with voices, souls, and minds—are threatened with exile. Young Elphaba, green and wild and misunderstood, is determined to protect the Animals—even if it means combating the mysterious Wizard, even if it means risking her single chance at romance. Ever wiser in guilt and sorrow, she can find herself grateful when the world declares her a witch. And she can even make herself glad for that young girl from Kansas.

Recognized as an iconoclastic tour de force on its initial publication, the novel has inspired the blockbuster musical of the same name—one of the longest-running plays in Broadway history. Popular, indeed. But while the novel’s distant cousins hail from the traditions of magical realism, mythopoeic fantasy, and sprawling nineteenth-century sagas of moral urgency, Maguire’s Wicked is as unique as its green-skinned witch.

• Product Details
• About the Author
• Read an Excerpt
• Table of Contents
• What People Are Saying
• Reading Group Guide

Product Details

About the Author

Gregory Maguire is the New York Times bestselling author of the Wicked Years, a series that includes Wicked_—the beloved classic that is the basis for the blockbuster Tony Award–winning Broadway musical of the same name and the major motion picture—_Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz. His series Another Day continues the story of Oz with The Brides of Maracoor, The Oracle of Maracoor, and The Witch of Maracoor, and his other novels include A Wild Winter Swan, Hiddensee, After Alice, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Lost, and Mirror Mirror. Some of his novels for children include Cress Watercress, Leaping Beauty, and Egg & Spoon, winner of a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award Honor. He lives in New England and France.

Hometown:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

June 9, 1954

Place of Birth:

Albany, New York

Education:

B.A., SUNY at Albany, 1976; M.A., Simmons College, 1978; Ph.D., Tufts University, 1990

Read an Excerpt

Wicked LP
Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Chapter One

The Root of Evil

From the crumpled bed the wife said, "I think today's the day. Look how low I've gone."

"Today? That would be like you, perverse and inconvenient," said her husband, teasing her, standing at the doorway and looking outward, over the lake, the fields, the forested slopes beyond. He could just make out the chimneys of Rush Margins, breakfast fires smoking. "The worst possible moment for my ministry. Naturally."

The wife yawned. "There's not a lot of choice involved. From what I hear. Your body gets this big and it takes over—if you can't accommodate it, sweetheart, you just get out of its way. It's on a track of its own and nothing stops it now." She pushed herself up, trying to see over the rise of her belly. "I feel like a hostage to myself. Or to the baby."

"Exert some self-control." He came to her side and helped her sit up. "Think of it as a spiritual exercise. Custody of the senses. Bodily as well as ethical continence."

"Self-control?" She laughed, inching toward the edge of the bed. "I have no self left. I'm only a host for the parasite. Where's my self, anyway? Where'd I leave that tired old thing?"

"Think of me." His tone had changed; he meant this.

"Frex"—she headed him off—"when the volcano's ready there's no priest in the world can pray it quiet."

"What will my fellow ministers think?"

"They'll get together and say, 'Brother Frexspar, did you allow your wife to deliver your first child when you had a community problem to solve? How inconsiderate of you;it shows a lack of authority. You're fired from the position.'" She was ribbing him now, for there was no one to fire him. The nearest bishop was too distant to pay attention to the particulars of a unionist cleric in the hinterland.

"It's just such terrible timing."

"I do think you bear half the blame for the timing," she said. "I mean, after all, Frex."

"That's how the thinking goes, but I wonder,"

"You wonder?" She laughed, her head going far back. The line from her ear to the hollow below her throat reminded Frex of an elegant silver ladle. Even in morning disarray, with a belly like a scow, she was majestically good-looking. Her hair had the bright lacquered look of wet fallen oak leaves in sunlight. He blamed her for being born to privilege and admired her efforts to overcome it—and all the while he loved her, too.

"You mean you wonder if you're the father"—she grabbed the bedstead; Frex took hold of her other arm and hauled her half-upright—"or do you question the fatherliness of men in general?" She stood, mammoth, an ambulatory island. Moving out the door at a slug's pace, she laughed at such an idea. He could hear her laughing from the outhouse even as he began to dress for the day's battle.

Frex combed his beard and oiled his scalp. He fastened a clasp of bone and rawhide at the nape of his neck, to keep the hair out of his face, because his expressions today had to be readable from a distance: There could be no fuzziness to his meaning. He applied some coal dust to darken his eyebrows, a smear of red wax on his flat cheeks. He shaded his lips, A handsome priest attracted more penitents than a homely one.

In the kitchen yard Melena floated gently, not with the normal gravity of pregnancy but as if inflated, a huge balloon trailing its strings through the dirt. She carried a skillet in one hand and a few eggs and the whiskery tips of autumn chives in the other. She sang to herself, but only in short phrases. Frex wasn't meant to hear her.

His sober gown buttoned tight to the collar, his sandals strapped on over leggings, Frex took from its hiding place—beneath a chest of drawers—the report sent to him from his fellow minister over in the village of Three Dead Trees. He hid the brown pages within his sash. He had been keeping them from his wife, afraid that she would want to come along—to see the fun, if it was amusing, or to suffer the thrill of it if it was terrifying.

As Frex breathed deeply, readying his lungs for a day of oratory, Melena dangled a wooden spoon in the skillet and stirred the eggs. The tinkle of cowbells sounded across the lake. She did not listen; or she listened but to something else, to something inside her. It was sound without melody—like dream music, remembered for its effect but not for its harmonic distresses and recoveries. She imagined it was the child inside her, humming for happiness. She knew he would be a singing child.

Melena heard Frex inside, beginning to extemporize, warming up, calling forth the rolling phrases of his argument, convincing himself again of his righteousness.

How did that proverb go, the one that Nanny singsonged to her, years ago, in the nursery?

Born in the morning,
Woe without warning;
Afternoon child
Woeful and wild;
Born in the evening,
Woe ends in grieving.
Night baby borning
Same as the morning.

But she remembered this as a joke, fondly. Woe is the natural end of life, yet we go on having babies.

No, said Nanny, an echo in Melena's mind (and editorializing as usual): No, no, you pretty little pampered hussy. We don't go on having babies, that's quite apparent. We only have babies when we're young enough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the full measure of it—we're slow learners, we women—we dry up in disgust and sensibly halt production.

But men don't dry up, Melena objected; they can father to the death.

Ah, we're slow learners, Nanny countered. But they can't learn at all.

"Breakfast," said Melena, spooning eggs onto a wooden plate. Her son would not be as dull as most men. She would raise him up to defy the onward progress of woe.

"It is a time of crisis for our society," recited Frex. For a man who condemned worldly pleasures he ate with elegance. She loved to watch the arabesque of fingers and two forks. She suspected that beneath his righteous asceticism he possessed a hidden longing for the easy life.

"Every day is a great crisis for our society." She was being flip, answering him in the terms men use. Dear thick thing, he didn't hear the irony in her voice.

"We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values in jeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned."

Wicked LP Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Copyright © by Gregory Maguire. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

Prologue: On the Yellow Brick Road 1
Munchkinlanders
The Root of Evil 9
The Clock of the Time Dragon 18
The Birth of a Witch 24
Maladies and Remedies 36
The Quadling Glassblower 53
Geographies of the Seen and the Unseen 64
Child's Play 76
Darkness Abroad 89
Gillikin
Galinda 111
Boq 163
The Charmed Circle 229
City of Emeralds 315
In the Vinkus
The Voyage Out 397
The Jasper Gates of Kiamo Ko 432
Uprisings 508
The Murder and Its Afterlife 585

What People are Saying About This

Jill Paton Walsh

Gregory Maguire's donnes in Wicked are from Baum's land of Oz; but everything here has been recut to sparkle fresh and new, with illuminations shining in unexpected directions. Funny and serious, pulsing with imaginative energy, encompassing political thriller and moral reflection, this is truly a fabulous novel.
— (Jill Paton Walsh, author of Knowledge of Angels)

John Rowe Townsend

Here is a story that is at once a page-turner and a powerful stimulus to thought.
— (John Rowe Townsend, author of The Islanders)

Lloyd Alexander

Starting with the Wizard of Oz material, Gregory Maguire has added greater depth and different facets, creating something altogether different and unique. A magnificent work, a genuine tour de force.
— (Lloyd Alexander, author of The Chronicles of Prydain)

Wally Lamb

I fell quickly and totally under the spell of this remarkable, wry, and fully realized story. Maguire's adult fable examines some of literature's major themes: moral ambiguity, the nature of evil, the bittersweet dividends of power, the high costs of love. Elphaba — the Wicked Witch of the West — is as scary as ever, but this time in a different way: She's undeniably human, She's us.
— (Wally Lamb, author of She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True

Jane Langton

This book is a glorious frolic, a feast of language, a study of good and evil, and a massive history of the fabulous land of Oz.
— (Jane Langton, author of The Diamond in the Window)

Reading Group Guide

Our Book Club Recommendation
It's hard to pin down the aspect of Gregory Maguire's Wicked that is likely to fascinate book clubs the most. Is it the detail with which the author reimagines L. Frank Baum's fantasy world of Oz? The care with which Maguire takes the classic work and uses it to explore modern issues like justice and equal rights, superficial notions of beauty and ugliness, ecological concerns and domestic violence? Or, perhaps, is it the sheer delight in watching an immensely gifted writer take a set of familiar characters and imbue them with an entirely new life.

Of course, it is the Wicked Witch of the West herself who dominates this time around: Elphaba, as she is called, is now the complicated centerpiece of a story that once seemed to belong to the relatively simple Dorothy. Brilliant, troubled, passionate, and powerful, Elphaba stands in marked contrast to the girl from Kansas, who, on the whole, takes a backseat to the natives of Oz in this version. Maguire's method with Elphaba's tale is to unpack the simple idea of a "wicked witch" and ask the question, How do you get to be "wicked"? The novel offers the possibility that what from one perspective is a simple case of villainy could be, from another point of view, a life that doesn't resolve into a simple set of "good" or "bad" actions. Book clubs will be particularly interested in following how, as a heroine, Elphaba is a strong, deeply modern woman, whose intelligence is both her great strength and a curse almost as powerful as her more fantastic features, emerald skin and monstrous teeth.

Beyond the issues of moral character raised by Elphaba's story, Wicked provides readers with a host of delights, some of which echo the original Oz books and some of which are completely original. Reading groups will find that Maguire's language, and particularly his facility for making the world of Oz both contemporary yet fairy tale–like, provides fertile grounds for conversation about just where the difference between the "fantastic" and the "realistic" can be drawn, a skill which may invite comparisons to writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie.

Reading groups will perhaps find their greatest pleasure in discussing what Maguire has taken from the original book, and how he has altered or mutated Baum's world. Book clubs may even be interested in comparing the famed film version of The Wizard of Oz with the novel, to see what the author has borrowed from that source. In this sense Wicked is far more than a cleverly twisted tale about good and evil witches, Munchkin society, and talking animals -- it is a book that shows how a children's story can become a larger myth for an entire society. Maguire invites us to think about how and why we read fantasy, what we take from it as children, and what we can see in it as adults. Wicked may be "updating" L. Frank Baum's original work, but it also reveals how the original remains so captivating to generations of readers, young and old. Bill Tipper

Reading Group Materials from the Publisher
Summary

When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil?

Gregory Maguire creates a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again. Wicked is about a land where animals talk and strive to be treated like first-class citizens, Munchkinlanders seek the comfort of middle-class stability and the Tin Man becomes a victim of domestic violence. And then there is the little green-skinned girl named Elphaba, who will grow up to be the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, a smart, prickly and misunderstood creature who challenges all our preconceived notions about the nature of good and evil.

Questions for Discussion

• Gregory Maguire fashioned the name of Elphaba (pronounced EL-fa-ba) from the initials of the author of The Wizard of Oz, Lyman Frank Baum-L-F-B-Elphaba. Wicked derives some of its power from the popularity of its source material. Does meeting up with familiar characters and famous fictional situations require more patience and effort on the part of the reader, or less?
• Wicked flips the Oz we knew from the classic movie on its head. To what extent does Maguire's vision of Oz contradict the Oz we're familiar with? How have Dorothy and the other characters changed or remained the same? Has Wicked changed your conception of the original? If so, how?
• The novel opens with a scene in which the Witch overhears Dorothy, the Lion, the Scarecrow, and theTin Woodman gossiping about her. She's "possessed by demons," they say. "She was castrated at birth . . . she was an abused child . . . she's a dangerous tyrant." How does this scene set the stage for the story, and what themes does it introduce?
• What is the significance of Elphaba's green skin? What are the rewards of being so different, and what are the drawbacks? In Oz -- and in the real world -- what are the meanings associated with the color green, and are any of them pertinent to Elphaba's character?
• One of Wicked's key themes is the nature and roots of evil. What are the theories that Maguire sets out? Is Elphaba evil? Are her actions evil? Is there such a thing as evil, a free-floating power in the universe like time or gravity? Or is evil an attribute of the actions of human beings? (Hint: Turn to pages 231 and 370 for scenes that will draw you into the conversation.)
• Discuss the importance of the Clock of the Time Dragon. Does the Clock simply reflect events, or does it shape them? Why is it significant that Elphaba was born inside it? That Turtle Heart was killed by it? What revelations does it offer to Elphaba and the reader when she reencounters it at the end of the book?
• The first section of the book ends powerfully but enigmatically when the young Elphaba is discovered under the dock, cradled in the paws of a magical beast as if sitting on a throne. How do you interpret this scene, and what do you think it foretells, if anything?
• The place of Animals in society is an important theme in Wicked. Why does Elphaba make it her mission to fight for Animal rights? How else does social class define Oz, and why?
• [Galinda] reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear to her yet" (page 65). Discuss the transformation of Galinda, shallow Shiz student, to Glinda the Good Witch. How does she change -- and by how much? What is her eventual "significance," both in Oz and in the story?
• Discuss the ways in which Elphaba's determination and willfulness lend purpose and order to her life, and the cost of being such a strong character. Elphaba isn't the only strong female character in Wicked. How do Nessarose, Glinda, and Sarima deal with the issues of power and control? Where do each of them draw strength from? Is the world of Maguire's Oz more or less patriarchal than millennial America?
• Wicked is an epic story, built along the lines of a Shakespearean or Greek tragedy, in which the seeds of Elphaba's destiny are all sown early in the novel. How much of Elphaba's career is predestined, and how much choice does she have? Do you think that she was no more than a puppet of the Wizard or Madame Morrible, as she fears?
• Early in their unlikely friendship, Galinda catches a glimpse of Elphaba and thinks she "looked like something between an animal and an Animal, like something more than life but not quite Life" (pages 78-79). Discuss the dual, and sometimes contradictory, nature of Elphaba's character. Why does Elphaba insist that she doesn't have a soul?
• Who or what is Yackle? Where does she appear in the story, and what role does she serve in Elphaba's life? Is she good or evil -- both or neither?
• Was Elphaba's story essentially a tragedy or a triumph? Did she fail at every major endeavor, and thus fail at life; or because she refused to give up or change to suit the opinions of others, was her life a success? Is there a possibility that Dorothy's "baptismal splash" redeemed Elphaba on her deathbed, or was this the final indignity in a life of miserable mistakes?

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