Wicked Sucks
I have posted this to Amazon.com. Please go there and vote it helpful, so that it becomes a featured review. The public must know!!!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060987103/ref=pd_kar_gw_1/104-2290792-9860735?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155
Wicked Sucks
Sorry for the inelegant title. I sat here for a little while... trying to come up with something clever, but nothing captured the scope of my feelings about this book quite as well as that.
I found Wicked to be one of the weakest novels I have ever read and would strongly discourage you from picking it up. I'm not actually in the business of reviewing literature, but I have been astounded by the critical acclaim for this book, despite its incredible lack of depth and character.
Wicked starts from a safe premise: take a well-loved story and write a story within it. Tom Stoppard has made a career out of this, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead being a prime example. However, Maguire fumbles this by diverging from the source material at almost every contact point. His vision of Oz is pallid and mostly uninteresting. The development of Oz's religions, local customs, and such are limited in scope and generally not fresh. Unlike the world of Harry Potter, where the little touches make you curious for more, I felt very much that Maguire was crassly trying to flesh out the world of Oz simply to create storytelling space for future stories.
The characters are defiantly flat and frequently step out of their own characterizations to do things that are pointless and, often, absolutely baffling. Elfaba, a character who refused to carry out an assassination in the presence of a group of children, randomly, and spitefully, attempts to kick a well-meaning child in the back. Sarima, a widow whose husband disappeared under mysterious circumstances, is not at all interested in discovering the truth about her husband... even with the truth knocks on her door and BEGS her to listen. I found so many examples of behavior incongruous with common sense that I started second guessing my own. Would I, a green girl fatally allergic to water who has, for hundreds of pages, taken extremely detailed precautions to avoid every single drop of water, go ICE SKATING for no reason? Upon further examination, the only thing wrong with me was that I lacked the common sense to put this book down.
Wicked's plot is stilted and stumbles over itself as if it was written in one take without an editor. Maguire introduces plot threads and then does not resolve them, leaving the reader frustrated all every turn, waiting for payoffs that never come. Years at a time pass casually... key plot points are dropped in parentheticals hundreds of pages after you've forgotten their thrust. The plot meanders aimlessly for dozens of pages at a time, detailing the hide-and-seek exploits of minor characters, the sexual fantasies of a young girl, and the thoughtfully-named sisters Two through Seven.
Consistent mediocrity is the prose's hallmark. Maguire attempts to hide his lack of substance behind alternating complex and florid language. The prose is decidedly amateur and takes every opportunity to throw you off of a nice pace with its awkwardly-worded sentences, simplistic imagery, and general vulgarity. Maguire bumbles modern and antiquated phrases and concepts together in a way that makes the entire body seem anachronistic. The overall effect is slapdash and serves to jostle the reader out of the story.
Wicked does have one bright point however: the single worst plot twist I have ever seen. I think even the story editor at General Hospital would wince if you pitched him this one. Elphaba, asked if she is the mother of a dubious tagalong kid, replies to the effect of `well, it doesn't feel like I've ever had a kid... but there was that one time I was in a coma for a year. I guess I could have had him then." The coma she is talking about happened about a hundred pages before - but was not mentioned. I'm sorry... how do you NOT MENTION YOUR PROTAGONIST'S YEARLONG COMA IN A BOOK SUBTITLED "The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West"? Then, as if to demonstrate a complete contempt for the reader, about a hundred pages later, Maguire drops into a parenthetical that the boy is in fact the son her Elphaba's lover... but does not confirm her as the mother.
As for social commentary - which is a key theme of the book, according to the jacket - I found it sorely lacking. If Maguire's aim was to explain the motives and perceptions of evil, we can only conclude that he believes that evil is fueled by society's idiotic, illogical behavior. Having driven the highways of Los Angeles, I can certainly understand this sentiment, but Maguire misses just about every chance to explore the true nature evil. Nietzsche's famous phrase "gaze long into the abyss, and the abyss gazes into you" gets closer to explaining evil in eleven words than Maguire does in 400 pages.
You know how when you read most books, as you get closer to the end, you read faster? Some books, you can't even put them down. With this book, I had the opposite experience. The closer I got to the ending, as I realized there was nothing the author could do to salvage this train wreck, and there was no way for me to reclaim these precious hours of my life, I had to stop often - and could only read a page or two at a time. When I finished, I actually literally physically threw the book across the room.
I have never been this frustrated with a reading experience in my life. After a hundred pages, I decided to read on to see if the book improved. At two hundred, I plodded along out of sheer morbid curiosity. At three hundred, it was too late to turn back. At four hundred, I feel as if my brain has been violated. It may be too late for me - but it isn't too late for you! Skip this book and read something good.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060987103/ref=pd_kar_gw_1/104-2290792-9860735?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155
Wicked Sucks
Sorry for the inelegant title. I sat here for a little while... trying to come up with something clever, but nothing captured the scope of my feelings about this book quite as well as that.
I found Wicked to be one of the weakest novels I have ever read and would strongly discourage you from picking it up. I'm not actually in the business of reviewing literature, but I have been astounded by the critical acclaim for this book, despite its incredible lack of depth and character.
Wicked starts from a safe premise: take a well-loved story and write a story within it. Tom Stoppard has made a career out of this, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead being a prime example. However, Maguire fumbles this by diverging from the source material at almost every contact point. His vision of Oz is pallid and mostly uninteresting. The development of Oz's religions, local customs, and such are limited in scope and generally not fresh. Unlike the world of Harry Potter, where the little touches make you curious for more, I felt very much that Maguire was crassly trying to flesh out the world of Oz simply to create storytelling space for future stories.
The characters are defiantly flat and frequently step out of their own characterizations to do things that are pointless and, often, absolutely baffling. Elfaba, a character who refused to carry out an assassination in the presence of a group of children, randomly, and spitefully, attempts to kick a well-meaning child in the back. Sarima, a widow whose husband disappeared under mysterious circumstances, is not at all interested in discovering the truth about her husband... even with the truth knocks on her door and BEGS her to listen. I found so many examples of behavior incongruous with common sense that I started second guessing my own. Would I, a green girl fatally allergic to water who has, for hundreds of pages, taken extremely detailed precautions to avoid every single drop of water, go ICE SKATING for no reason? Upon further examination, the only thing wrong with me was that I lacked the common sense to put this book down.
Wicked's plot is stilted and stumbles over itself as if it was written in one take without an editor. Maguire introduces plot threads and then does not resolve them, leaving the reader frustrated all every turn, waiting for payoffs that never come. Years at a time pass casually... key plot points are dropped in parentheticals hundreds of pages after you've forgotten their thrust. The plot meanders aimlessly for dozens of pages at a time, detailing the hide-and-seek exploits of minor characters, the sexual fantasies of a young girl, and the thoughtfully-named sisters Two through Seven.
Consistent mediocrity is the prose's hallmark. Maguire attempts to hide his lack of substance behind alternating complex and florid language. The prose is decidedly amateur and takes every opportunity to throw you off of a nice pace with its awkwardly-worded sentences, simplistic imagery, and general vulgarity. Maguire bumbles modern and antiquated phrases and concepts together in a way that makes the entire body seem anachronistic. The overall effect is slapdash and serves to jostle the reader out of the story.
Wicked does have one bright point however: the single worst plot twist I have ever seen. I think even the story editor at General Hospital would wince if you pitched him this one. Elphaba, asked if she is the mother of a dubious tagalong kid, replies to the effect of `well, it doesn't feel like I've ever had a kid... but there was that one time I was in a coma for a year. I guess I could have had him then." The coma she is talking about happened about a hundred pages before - but was not mentioned. I'm sorry... how do you NOT MENTION YOUR PROTAGONIST'S YEARLONG COMA IN A BOOK SUBTITLED "The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West"? Then, as if to demonstrate a complete contempt for the reader, about a hundred pages later, Maguire drops into a parenthetical that the boy is in fact the son her Elphaba's lover... but does not confirm her as the mother.
As for social commentary - which is a key theme of the book, according to the jacket - I found it sorely lacking. If Maguire's aim was to explain the motives and perceptions of evil, we can only conclude that he believes that evil is fueled by society's idiotic, illogical behavior. Having driven the highways of Los Angeles, I can certainly understand this sentiment, but Maguire misses just about every chance to explore the true nature evil. Nietzsche's famous phrase "gaze long into the abyss, and the abyss gazes into you" gets closer to explaining evil in eleven words than Maguire does in 400 pages.
You know how when you read most books, as you get closer to the end, you read faster? Some books, you can't even put them down. With this book, I had the opposite experience. The closer I got to the ending, as I realized there was nothing the author could do to salvage this train wreck, and there was no way for me to reclaim these precious hours of my life, I had to stop often - and could only read a page or two at a time. When I finished, I actually literally physically threw the book across the room.
I have never been this frustrated with a reading experience in my life. After a hundred pages, I decided to read on to see if the book improved. At two hundred, I plodded along out of sheer morbid curiosity. At three hundred, it was too late to turn back. At four hundred, I feel as if my brain has been violated. It may be too late for me - but it isn't too late for you! Skip this book and read something good.