Book: "Wicked"
Jul. 7th, 2007 11:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timepiececlockI'm about 4 or 5 hours into the audio recording of Wicked: Life And Times Of the Wicked Witch Of the West, by Gregory Macguire. It's very interesting so far... the language is well-chosen and flowing within a scene, though the overall pacing is sometimes inconsistant.
For instance, we spent an enormous amount of time on Elpheba's family when she's an infant, but then we skip her entire childhood and pick up when she's 17. While I can already tell it was necessary for future plot purposes to explain her family so thoroughly, I feel like we missed out on a lot by not hearing more anecdotes of her childhood and growth. The only major connection between Baby!Elpheba and young-woman Elpheba seems to be her shyness, her teeth, and her green skin. Some necessary transition could have been filled in through stories from her childhood.
Other than some pacing issues, I'm really enjoying it. I imagined, from story descriptions, that it would be a cute if somewhat ironic black satire, something that makes you laugh as it turns the traditional story on its head. Something more like Roald Dahl would write. I expected a book written for young adults, with young adult themes and tropes. While there are shades of that, I was quite surprised to find that it's a book for adults, not teens, and while it goes to great lengths to flip your preconceived notions of Oz and dwells on irony... it takes itself quite seriously. It's set up from the beginning like a tragedy, a sort of Macbeth-style tale. It's themes so far have been such topics as religion, ethics, sin, idolotry, prejudice, classism, evil capitalism, and a general mood of cynicism. It features graphic sexual conversation, mildly graphic sex, gore, and murder.
Right now I'm in the second year of Elpheba's education, and I'm very curious about where the story is going. Some stuff has been foreshadowed (it took me forever to connect Turtleheart's talk of rubies with Dorothy's ruby slippers), while other stuff remains in the dark, and I have a lot of questions still. I hope they'll be answered when I finish it. I'll post about it again when it's done.
For instance, we spent an enormous amount of time on Elpheba's family when she's an infant, but then we skip her entire childhood and pick up when she's 17. While I can already tell it was necessary for future plot purposes to explain her family so thoroughly, I feel like we missed out on a lot by not hearing more anecdotes of her childhood and growth. The only major connection between Baby!Elpheba and young-woman Elpheba seems to be her shyness, her teeth, and her green skin. Some necessary transition could have been filled in through stories from her childhood.
Other than some pacing issues, I'm really enjoying it. I imagined, from story descriptions, that it would be a cute if somewhat ironic black satire, something that makes you laugh as it turns the traditional story on its head. Something more like Roald Dahl would write. I expected a book written for young adults, with young adult themes and tropes. While there are shades of that, I was quite surprised to find that it's a book for adults, not teens, and while it goes to great lengths to flip your preconceived notions of Oz and dwells on irony... it takes itself quite seriously. It's set up from the beginning like a tragedy, a sort of Macbeth-style tale. It's themes so far have been such topics as religion, ethics, sin, idolotry, prejudice, classism, evil capitalism, and a general mood of cynicism. It features graphic sexual conversation, mildly graphic sex, gore, and murder.
Right now I'm in the second year of Elpheba's education, and I'm very curious about where the story is going. Some stuff has been foreshadowed (it took me forever to connect Turtleheart's talk of rubies with Dorothy's ruby slippers), while other stuff remains in the dark, and I have a lot of questions still. I hope they'll be answered when I finish it. I'll post about it again when it's done.
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Date: 2007-07-13 04:11 pm (UTC)