Wicked, by Gregory Maguire is the story of the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. This is an effort to flesh out the character of the Witch from the story. In Baum's book, the Wicked Witch of the West is the penultimate evil figure who even hates terriers. I'm looking forward to this book, hoping that it is what Grendel is to Beowulf.
Started: November 25, 2009
Completed: December 14, 2009
Recommendation: A fun read, great beach book for those who like a quick paced story with some literary skill mixed in.
Recommended By: Numerous friends who have suggested that I would really enjoy this book. Most recent recommendations came from a local book sale where one of the people working on the sale put the book aside for me.
Words I looked up:
fewmets - the droppings of an animal, by which the hunter identifies the prey.
deshabelle - in a state of undress or wearing one's underclothes
deliquescence - the process of melting away or becoming moist from absorbing moisture from the air
Review:
I wonder how many people missed the lovely irony of the tornado having deliquescence in its description because they didn't know what the word meant. I have a habit of looking up words that I don't recognize when I come across them. In this book, I started the list late in the book (usually, I look up the word then move on, but I've lately thought it would be good to have these words and their definitions down somewhere else, so I put them here), so the few words listed are not representative at all of the dozens of times I reached for the dictionary. This rich use of language made the book more pleasurable to me, although it could be a stumbling block for others.
This book represents an Oz re-imagined in many ways. It talks about the financial arrangements among the different parts of Oz. It also discusses political strife. Moreover, the witches of Oz are not quite the figures in the book that they are in, say, the movie. The clever touches, such as the jokes that run through Munchkinland after the house drops help make Oz less of a fantasy land and more of, well, a strange land.
I enjoyed this book although, in my opinion, it did little to reveal "the other half of the story;" it did tell another, very engaging story with a much more interesting and rich environment. It also left the joy of the original Wizard of Oz as a fun fairy tale that can be seen as such through the lens of one's childhood or through the lens of the sad story of the Wicked Witch of the West.
This book represents an Oz re-imagined in many ways. It talks about the financial arrangements among the different parts of Oz. It also discusses political strife. Moreover, the witches of Oz are not quite the figures in the book that they are in, say, the movie. The clever touches, such as the jokes that run through Munchkinland after the house drops help make Oz less of a fantasy land and more of, well, a strange land.
I enjoyed this book although, in my opinion, it did little to reveal "the other half of the story;" it did tell another, very engaging story with a much more interesting and rich environment. It also left the joy of the original Wizard of Oz as a fun fairy tale that can be seen as such through the lens of one's childhood or through the lens of the sad story of the Wicked Witch of the West.
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