Wicked is the story of the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, told from the perspective that that the well-known fairy tale may not be all true.
The premise of the novel is certainly interesting, and the themes it follows certainly make you think.
The characters were well created and three dimensional, right up to the end, where everything went sour.
The story begins, not with the witch but with the events of her birth.
We follow young Elphaba (what, you thought her parents just called her 'Wicked'?) through her infancy, and then jump abruptly to her schooling in her young adulthood, where she meets up with Galinda (later known as Glinda, Good Witch of the North).
Skip a few years later to her revolutionary stage, where she stands up to the Great and Powerful Wizard, and later still to a rather bizarre imprisonment with the family of her lover.
The novel culminates, of course, in her fatal interaction with Dorothy and her friends.
I enjoyed the "other" side of Oz - a place where talking Animals are treated as beasts and losing their rights, where the Wizard is a despot who overthrew the existing monarch, where Glinda may well have been magiked into submission.
I also enjoyed the depth given to the life of the Witch - more information about her sister, the well-known Witch of the East, her attempts to make her roommate Glinda use her brain rather than her social instinct, her foray into Animal rights, and her lover and resulting tragedy.
I also enjoyed the thought-provoking questions about evil.
Is evil actions misunderstood? Is it not feeling bad when you do something wrong? Is it innate, something you are born with? Is it defined by society? I disagree with the authors conclusion, but I certainly enjoyed being made to think.
As a story, this was fairly enjoyable, but I struggled with a few things.
I didn't like the enormous skips in time.
Although they were marked by sections, they were still confusing, and since they occurred almost always in the middle of an important action, I was left wondering how things turned out for a lot of pages.
Elphaba struggled with finding herself, which made her go back and forth a lot.
And I'm not sure I bought the explanation for why she and her sister were called 'wicked' - Nessie didn't seem the type to change over like that, though I would have expected it from Elphaba.
The point of view jumped several times within action, as well, which is an enormous pet peeve with me.
I don't like going from one character's mind to another because I often miss where the change occurred and am left thinking that the first was thinking the second's thoughts.
But the biggest problem I had with the ending was how flat it fell.
The first sections of the novel were rich and detailed.
The last section read like a pumped up fairytale.
I believe this was most likely intentional, as the last section dealt quite literally with the fairytale part of the story.
And if the whole novel had been written as such, the last part would have been easier to deal with.
But after such detail, the ending was disappointing.
I could believe the reason the Witch went after the shoes, if it had been fleshed out some more.
I have trouble following the way she vacillated when she sent her familiars after Dorothy - first she wants to kill her, then bring her to dinner, then kill her, then bring her to dinner.
Huh? I did like Dorothy's reason for approaching the Witch, but the whole "murder" section felt rough and forced.
Overall, this was a pretty good novel, and a new take on an old fairytale.
I'm surprised at popular it has become, however, though perhaps I shouldn't be, based on the whole "there is no evil" argument.
Still, it was quite interesting, and I am still unsure if I will follow up with the sequel, Son of a Witch.