Wicked

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

When we first went over the rainbow in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, we heard the story from a simple Kansas farm girl’s perspective. Gregory Maguire’s delightful Wicked gives us the real dirt on what happened. Elphaba Thropp, later unfairly dubbed the Wicked Witch of the West, is a real piece of work, but you’d be prickly, too, if you grew up with green skin, deathly allergic to water, and having everyone calling you horrible names. Far from a stock one-dimensional villain motivated by mindless evil, Elphaba’s pushed to extreme measures by her rough childhood and Oz’s sociopolitical turmoil. Maguire compassionately fleshes out Baum’s source material with echoes of Catholic theology, ancient Greek theater, and Dickensian literature, making Elphie’s triumphs and tragedies hit way harder. Politically charged and emotionally resonant, Wicked demonstrates that there is often more to a story than you first hear.