Wicked

Yes, I read it. Did anyone else read it? Someone must have, it's sold some ridiculous number of copies, and many people are very opinionated about it. They either love it or despise it, it seems.
I'm going to ride the middle road, myself. I didn't get it. Ok, let me clarify that. I understood the book. I completely understood the parallels that Maguire was drawing between Oz and our society. None of that escaped me. But honestly, I can say I don't think it was done all that well. I don't think this book was one of complete genious, but I can't say it was completely crap, either. He made some very good points in the book, and some points he just beat you over the head with. There were some situations that really could have used more clarification or description, and some that had too much.
If you haven't read the book, it is about Elphaba, the "Wicked Witch of the West", trying to turn the myth that she was evil on it's head. Interestingly, she was born evil (or was she??). Green, possibly hermaphroditic, and with pointed teeth, the first thing she does after taking her first breaths is bite off someone's finger. Is she evil, did she mean to do it? Or is she just a baby with an unfortunate dental situation she can't control? Is she evil because of her "handicaps"? That's pretty much the underlying current of the book. What is the cause of evil? Does it just exist, or does it develop? Is that evil at all? Is evil intended or accidental? Well, turns out Elphaba grows up, loses the teeth, is still green, and leads a sad, somewhat solitary life of loss and means harm to no one (there is an exception to this, and it's not Dorothy). Truly, she just seemed like a normal person to me, albeit a green one.
As for the theme of evil and all it's questions, in the book, I feel that I got beaten over the head with it. Elphaba talked to herself about evil non stop in the book and it became boring. Situations arose where the author tried to make you think about evil. It was too much. I understood the paradox in the beginning of the story, and to have it re-hashed over and over was tiresome. I started to skim those parts.
There were some points in the book that I thought were very interesting, and they weren't the main ones. For example, when Elphaba was born, she was not what her mother was expecting. She was expecting a boy, Elphaba was a girl, she was expecting a non-green infant, oh well on that one, that sort of thing. The point that was interesting was that Nanny, who came to take care of Elphaba, saw her and wondered if Elphaba had chosen her own color and gender before she was born, instead of it being some sort of weird genetic mutation. I don't know why, but that struck a cord with me. What an interesting idea. I'm sure it has some implications I'm not aware of yet, but that one stuck with me.
The other point that I thought was interesting was the idea of forgiveness. Elphaba had an affair with a married man for a while in the book. He was killed, causing grief for Elphaba, and causing her to want to tell the man's wife (her name was Sarima) about the affair, to seek forgiveness. Sarima wouldn't even hear Elphaba's story. Her thinking was that Elphaba had a burden of guilt that she was bearing, and she did not want that burden of guilt to be laid on her, by hearing Elphaba's confession. I thought that was interesting, that guilt was a burden that could be transferred. That Elphaba owned the burden, and Sarima wouldn't take it away to make her feel better, to then make herself feel worse. She would not allow the transfer. Instead, she made up stories about how her husband had died and whom he was having the affair with so she wouldn't face the truth. I think she knew the truth anyway. But I also think that everybody knows that the truth in your head is never as terrible as the truth when someone tells it to you. I don't know what it is about that communication. But once someone tells you something you may already know, it just makes it that much worse and that much more real. Sarima was trying to avoid having to face that reality, though she knew it all along. And in return she was punishing Elphaba with her own guilt. Without a transfer and forgiveness, Elphaba had to carry that grief and guilt the rest of her days. A fitting punishment, really.
So that part I thought was interesting. But it was at the back of the book, maybe in the last 200 pages (the book's 538 pages long). The rest of the book was consumed with the whole evil thing, and busy with making parallels to humans and human society. The parallels between Unionism and Christianity and Lurlinism and Paganism were boring because I felt they were too obvious. The struggle for Animals to be treated as humans was uninteresting, as it dealt with the question of why they are different, do they have souls, why were there Animals (basically talking animals with the ability to think and reason) and animals (just regular animals) and why and how were they different? Elphaba was much more interested in this than I was. Honestly, anyone who thinks animals (and I'm talking dogs and cats like we "own" here) don't have a soul or think for themselves is a complete idiot and never had an animal in their lives. Anyone who's had a "pet" knows they are their own "people", if you will. They don't talk, but if they could, I know they'd give us all a piece of their minds. I think by the end of the book, the point that Animals and animals weren't actually different was coming across, but in the wrong way. Elphaba kept the company of a monkey and some crows and bees, who weren't going to go off to college or get a job and were just animals and not Animals. They understood her just fine, and responded like sentient beings. I think the author was trying to chalk that up to her being a magical person, but that's a load of crap, honestly.
One other idea that the author proposed was that the Wizard (who was a terrible person and did terrible things) felt he couldn't be held responsible for them because Oz was not his world. So because he wasn't from there, anything he did there couldn't be judged to be bad or good because he was in some way "above" it. Removed from it, if you will. That was interesting, because I believe that happens in our society, too. Anonimity breeds animosity. He wasn't of their world, not like them, he could do what he likes. We feel far less awful telling off someone via email or on the phone than we do telling them off to their faces. Leaving a scathing comment for someone via the internet is much easier than walking up to them and berating them. His killings and imprisonings were parallels to this. That was interesting. And of course, Dorothy was his opposite. She falls out of the sky and kills someone and immediately feels terrible about it. She is from the same world as the wizard. Why should she care about an "other"? Yet she does. Go figure. Perhaps the answer is that absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don't know.
The author also dabbled with the idea of fate. Back when Elphaba was in college, her roommate Galinda (or Glinda, as she decided to be called) had a sort of premonition about whom she would marry. It was vague and fleeting, but she did marry him, causing me to think about whether or not it was coincidence or was it "written in the stars". It was a subtle point. The idea of fate came up again later, but it was not as subtle. I don't think that the theme was particularly well developed.
Elphaba's obsession with the shoes was forced and I thought, obvious. She wanted them because they were a symbol of the love her father had for her sister, Nessarose (the Wicked Witch of the East). By giving one daughter a gift of beauty and not the other, he was shunning her. He was saying "you are not acceptable to me. I cannot love you as much" to Elphaba. Interestingly, he showered his love on a horribly disfigured sister, not loving the whole one as much. One has to suppose it was because Nessarose was a "normal" color, and not green. Or you could think of it as Nessarose was the product (possibly) of his wife (whom he loved, assumably) and a man that he loved and not his child. So he would love the child because he loved the parents. Whatever. When the shoes first surfaced, Elphaba was jealous of them. When Dorothy got the shoes after Nessarose died, she got manic. She wanted the love that her father meant with those shoes for her own. But again, it was forced and kind of ridiculous. I felt that part of the story was there because the shoes had to be worked in somehow.
There were lots of other elements to the book that were very pedestrian. Drugs, drinking, orgies, sex, none of it was particularly shocking, though I got the feeling the author meant it to be. I don't have any idea why Elphaba was considered a witch, as she wasn't magical particularly, and didn't seem to subscribe to a faith that would have her called so. And I am mystified as to why she lit the damn broom on fire, causing the water thing and her death. There didn't seem to be a reason for it, and quite honestly felt like a tool to just have her killed like in the movie.
All in all, I fell lukewarm about the book. I must say I have NO IDEA how they'd make the damn thing into a musical, cause stage material, it is not. I suppose they'd cut it down significantly or just re-write it all together and loosely base it on the book. As to whether or not it followed the books (yes, the Wizard of Oz was a series) at all, I have to say "sort of". "Wicked" (sorry there's no underline here, or I'd use it) was much darker, and not meant for children by any stretch, but I read those Oz books by L. Frank Baum when I was a kid, and I always thought there was something "off" about them. They were nice and cute and happy, but I felt, at that time, that there was something under the narrative that was not so nice and cute and happy. It's been a long time since I have read those books, so I could be wrong. But that "flavor" has stuck with me. The movie version, I remember feeling, was very sugar coated. Way too clear cut on good and evil. The Baum books were not as clear on that point, and I know that Maguire tried to muddy those waters a lot more. I'm not sure he succeeded.