Blog Post #2 Wicked by Gegory Maguire

I have chosen the first "making connections" prompt to respond to:

1.  Write about the connections you see between the book and your world, another book you have read, a film you have seen or a song. Add pictures or links to the things that you connect this book to.

I have been abnormally afraid of traditionally frightening things as far back as I can remember-- ghost stories, haunted houses, scary movies.  One of my earliest memories of being terrified by a movie involves me working up the courage to make it through the Wicked Witch's appearances in the Wizard of Oz without scrambling under the blankies, where I would be infinitely safer.  Naturally, as I am now reading about this woman who haunted my childhood, I am connecting what I remember about this villain from the movie to what I am learning about her as a... hero?  Well, I'm not sure if she'll be a hero yet, but she's the protagonist, so it's looking like she might turn out to be heroic.

When the baby Wicked Witch, Elphaba, is first introduced, she is quite horrifying and violent-- like a ferral cat but with shark's teeth and a penchant for biting.  That seemed to fit with the image of the adult woman she would become according to the film.  She ends up as an awful adult, so OF COURSE she was an evil demon baby.  However, now that I am about 100 pages in, I am seeing the Elphaba as a poor young woman off to school and being picked on by the other, wealthier and more popular girls.  Now I'm staring to feel for her.  She doesn't appear cruel and vicious.  She is shy, alone, and the target of the mean twinkies she's surrounded by.  This is the first place in the book we actually get to see Elphaba speak, which I expect will lead to revealing much more about her character than I currently know.

More than The Wizard of Oz, I am connecting this book to the 1985 movie Return to Oz.  Where the original was a family favorite, full of warm scenes and charming characters, this follow-up was nightmarish.  Don't be fooled by the light-hearted cover, this movie scared the snot out of all seven people who have seen it.  Dorothy wakes up in an insane asylum, and basically things get worse from there.  Dark, depressing, squalid-- the tone set in this movie is the exact one I get from the book.  Additionally, one of the characters is now referring to Ticky-Tocky brass, robot people.  In the pic at left, the rotund gent is just this sort of character, who, I believe, is called "Tick Tock".

The other thing I keep trying to connect this book to is the recent musical of the same name, which I have not seen and know nothing about save there is some song about defying gravity.  So far, this book is all squalor and meanness, which I have a hard time imagining set to music and jazz hands.  However, if producers managed to pull it off with Titanic the Musical and a Green Day album, I guess a re-imagining of a Hollywood classic shouldn't be beyond belief.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that I was also in the play The Wizard of Oz, when I was in high school.  My goodness, I didn't realize I had quite so many Oz-related connections.  That rendition of the story is much like the movie, but with a few different scenes.  The story with the Witch, however, was pretty much the same.  Although a former Munchkin, whose stage direction was to hide from the terrifying witch when she appeared on the scene, I will do my best to give Elphaba a chance to be this book's hero.