Dan's Reviews > Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

This is one of my favorites. I generally like McGuire's books, but in my opinion this is by far the best of them.

After reading my teenaged years away through endless sci-fi/fantasy books where the characters are often painfully stereotypical "golden boys" (and they are almost always boys), it is refreshing to encounter a book where the protagonist is deeply flawed, but yet we respect her. The characters and interpersonal relationships in this book are complicated but leave you guessing about details that occur behind the scenes and curious about the tales that are left untold.

This is not to say that the complicated style never has its frustrations. There are occasional scenes which I still do not really understand, but for the most part these have merely increased the "re-readability" of this novel and kept me on my toes while reading. The story also does not make for easy reading due to some of these complications, and I could see the story turning off readers who might have been misled by the apparently fairy-tale-esq premise of the book into expecting something else.

McGuire slips in some of his philosophy seamlessly into the dialog and actions of the characters. There were moments when I would read through a sentence of apparently innocuous text, only to do a mental double-take seconds later, struck by how easily a profound statement was weaved into the story without pomp or preamble.

In my opinion, at the very least this is an entertaining book if you have ever watched The Wizard of Oz. But I also find it to be much more than just a good yarn.