Blog Post #4 Wicked by Gregory Maguire

In the last few weeks, several students have asked me, "is that a good book?"  I haven't really come up with an answer yet.  I don't looooooove it the way many people have, but I don't hate it either.  Also, I AM still reading it, which is significant because I am quick to abandon books I don't like.  Within the last week, I have really started to get in to it. In books, characters are really important to me, and the more I get to know these characters, the more I like them and the book overall.  Now that the action is starting to take off more, maybe I will start to love the book.  Now on to this week's prompt:

1. What is the author of this book saying about life and living?  What is the theme of the book?  How do you know?

I think that one of the author's more obvious points is something like the old cliche "every story has two sides".  Because Maguire decided to re-tell a familiar story from an "evil" character's point of view, he seems to be suggesting that it is important to understand the perspective of the people we judge.  Further, because Elphaba, the "wicked witch of the west", is an intelligent, but poor and unfortunate girl, the reader almost has no choice but to sympathize with her.  By forcing us to sympathize with an "evil" character, we realize that our initial judgments, based on The Wizard of Oz, were wrong.  

In the book, there are two kinds of animals.  Animals, with a capital "A," have basically the same abilities of thought, speech and consciousness that humans have while animals, with a lowercase "a," are more like the way we think of animals in our world today.  At this point in the book there is great unrest because there is a political movement on the rise to discriminate against the Animals and force them back to the roles of mere animals.  Although this is dealing with animals and Animals, the disagreements and political tension are very similar to the problems between groups of people when various races or religions clash.  I can't yet say exactly what point the author is trying to make about this kind of discrimination and oppression because I don't yet know the fate of all of the characters involved.  However, the main characters are working on behalf of the Animals, and a highly respected Animal was just murdered, probably because he was trying to scientifically prove their equality to humans.  Therefore, I suspect that Maguire is trying to show us that equality is an important cause to support. Moreover, I think that he is trying to show that stepping up and working for any cause that you believe in is important, be it equality or something else.