Hammer Reviews: The Wicked Trilogy

The three Wicked series books, written by author Gregory Maguire, are probably some of the best books written since 1990. The first book, Wicked, has been turned into a Broadway musical, and is supposedly getting a movie version. Wicked reimagines the world of Oz created by L. Frank Baum in the early 20th Century. Instead of focusing on Dorothy and her adventures, it focuses instead on the Witches of Oz, well before the appearance of Dorothy. Wicked starts with the birth of Elphaba Thropp, better known as the Wicked Witch of the West. From there we see her slowly become the "Wicked" witch, but it seems that there is far more to her story. The sequel, Son of a Witch, picks up where the first left off, with the death of Elphaba Thropp. This time we focus on her maybe son, Liir as he goes about doing what he must, and continuing his mother's mission. Son of a Witch ends as the first begins, with the birth of a green skinned girl. 8 years after the end of Son of a Witch, we get the story A Lion Among Men. This one follows the story of the Cowardly Lion, and his part in the aforementioned adventures, as well as developing his own story. Maguire is a literary genius because he created within the course of one novel an emotional attachment from the reader to the characters and the new reimagined Oz. It took 3 Silent Hill games, 4 seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, 3 Star Wars movies just to develop the same relationships in their respective universes. This is why I would consider the Wicked Trilogy to be some of the best modern literature ever written, not only because it refreshed an old and stale series into a new entity, but because it is very easy to develop an emotional attachment to the character. We begin to empathise more with Elphaba (named after L. Frank Baum's initials, a phonetic pronunciation of LFB)than we empathise with Dorothy. I highly recommend any and all of these books to just about anyone and everyone. I'm a guy and I read the first book in less than an hour. It has to be an AMAZINGLY good book for me to finish it that fast. You can never again look at The Wizard of Oz the same way.