Wicked...starting out

I actually did like this story. I do think it started slow and got a whole lot better. And also I haven't seen the play myself I have heard that it is much better then the book and worth seeing if it is ever playing around you! If you do make it through this one. There is a second one called the witches son. And this one just got worse! I don't know what he was thinking but it was just awful!!! I would steer clear of it unless you want to see how boring it was! I would like to read some of the other stories from this author about some of the other fairy tales. Remember when reading these stories they are telling them from a diffrent point of view. So the story does seemed changed in parts taking away from the real story. They are not by the same authors. And they were written ages apart from each other!!! Do not look as this as a second book or such of the origional book. Its actually better to kind of forget the real story until you've read through the whole book and then you can put them back together at the end and see how two diffrent people have completely diffrent looks and points of views on things. Its kind of like the media now a days...you only see what THEY want you to see! I think this was one of the best things about this story! Hope it gets better for you!

In my opinion, all of Gregory McGuire's books start out really slow. However, they are well worth the wait. It took me 50-75 pages to get into any of his books, Wicked especially, and Wicked is my favorite of them all. It's just his writing style, for the first part it's really a book you don't have trouble walking away from. Don't though, it's worth it!

I really enjoyed the book, but purely for what is was, not as a complement to the Wizard of Oz. It's very divorced from the source material. Once Elphaba is older and it becomes *her* story, I found it a lot more interesting. It is dark and violent and racy, but to me that just seemed a tip of the hat to the original Grimm's tales, which are so cleaned up and anesthetized by Disney that most people would be floored if they read how gruesome and dark the original stories were.