Something Wicked's going on 'round here

[bibliogramma]

Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, to be precise.

I loved this, and I'm not even that much of an Oz fan. I knew enough about F. L. Baum's universe to place the book against its background, get the drift of what was going on, and see how the whole Oz experience was being inverted, subjected to some lovely race, class and gender analysis, and re-presented as a chronicle of resistance.

What person with even a shred of the geeky outsider in her body couldn't feel for Elphaba? What person without a smidgen of social conscience could fail to understand the path she follows, right to the biter end?

I am in general a fan of the retelling of fairy tales and children's stories in order to explore the unpleasant truths of social conditioning and control behind them, and Wicked not only does this very well, but it is also well written, delightfully satirical, and generally wicked. In a good way, of course.