This weekend I finished “Out of Oz,” by Gregory Maguire which was released on November 1, 2011. This was the long awaited final volume in the Wicked Years.
Long before the Broadway smash hit “Wicked” made every little girl (and more than a few little boys) long to be “Popular,” Maguire wrote Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. And long before that, as a child, I read every one of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum.
Maquire’s take is a bit different, and I liked it. His view of Oz is filled with political intrigue and scandal, family drama and of course, the civil rights of talking animals.
In “Out of Oz” Dorothy comes back. She a few years older, but it’s several years later in Oz. Funny how time never seems to work quite the same way in alternate realities. But Dorothy is not the main character. Nor are the other familiar faces of the Cowardly Lion (a.k.a. Brrr) and Glinda the Good Witch. Rather we meet “Rain,” a misfit orphan in the house of Glinda. It’s not until later that we begin to realize that Rain is the grandaughter of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West.
I’ll leave it there other than to say that Maquire is a masterful writer. He brings Oz to life in a new way, a new dimension.
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This weekend I finished “Out of Oz,” by Gregory Maguire which was released on November 1, 2011. This was the long awaited final volume in the Wicked Years.
