Wicked is a novel by Gregory Maguire, re-telling L. Frank Baum‘s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Gave up on: 4.11.2025
[Here are my reviews of movie adaptation and musical.]

Plot:
In a small town in the middle of nowhere, a minister’s wife gives birth under pretty much the worst circumstances. The child that she has, Elphaba, is green. She bites. She is suspected of everything bad and rarely receives a kind word. When Elphaba is grown, she attends Shiz university where she gets paired with Galinda, who is pretty and wants to advance in life. The two couldn’t be any more different. But a kinship between them develops nonetheless. But as the political landscape in Oz changes rapidly, the two of them have very different roles to play.

I had heard that Wicked was not a good novel, but I had inherited a copy from a friend of mine (who didn’t want to keep it when he moved) and decided, I wanted to go for it before the second part of the movie adaptation of the musical came out. Well. I am here to tell you that you can believe people when they tell you it isn’t worth it. I couldn’t even bring myself to finish it.

As I said, I didn’t expect the book to be the read of the century, but even at the very beginning, I figured that I would be in trouble with it: when Elphaba’s mom is carted around during labor as if it was nothing, and then given drugs by the midwife that make her pass out RIGHT WHEN SHE NEEDS TO DO THE WORK OF PUSHING OUT THE BABY, I realized that this book probably wouldn’t work for me. Nevermind the copious amount of fart jokes and the like. I’m not a fan of fecal humor for the most part but Maguire seems to be.

That the book makes a considerable time jump after detailing so much of Elphaba’s early childhood, is just one of the really bad structural choices the novel makes. Choices that include way too many tangents like a visit to a sex club that seems like a fever dream version of Eyes Wide Shut, and at a pretty important turning point in the plot to boot. It is also strange that it often gives us the perspectives of people around Elphaba, but never of Elphaba herself (at least not in the part I read) – it is her story, but she is not allowed to tell it. We only get to see her through the eyes of others.

I fought my way through to about the halfway point of the book, I think. I did actually put it down and started reading Unraveled, which I rarely do (I am usually a one book at a time gal). That had more to do with the fact that I was traveling and my room didn’t have a reading lamp, so I grabbed the e-reader rather than Wicked, but after having finished Unraveled and returning to Wicked, it just underscored how badly written Wicked really was.

The point of no return for me came after Maguire, having already committed the sin of writing of “thin, expressive breasts” (yeah, my breasts are so very expressive, they say everything I don’t say), then lets Elphaba call Fiyero “Yero my hero” and it drove me up the wall that this looks like it should rhyme BUT IT DOESN’T. I decided life was to short for this – and I would rather keep my love for the musical version unharmed by continuing with this.

Summarizing: watch the musical, forget the book exists.