The #1 New York Times bestseller and basis for the smash hit musical and two major motion
pictures. Look for part one of WICKED the movie now streaming and the stunning conclusion
WICKED: FOR GOOD With millions of copies in print around the world Gregory Maguire's Wicked is
established not only as a commentary on our time but as a work of classic fantasy literature to
revisit for years to come. This iconic Oz retelling relishes the inspired inventions of L.
Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz while playing sleight of hand with our
collective memories of the 1939 MGM film. In this fast-paced fantastically real and supremely
entertaining novel Maguire has populated the largely unknown world of Oz with the power of his
own imagination. Years before Dorothy and her dog crash-land the origin story of another
little girl begins. This girl Elphaba is born with emerald-green skin-no easy burden in a
land as mean and poor as Oz where superstition and magic are not strong enough to explain or
overcome the natural disasters of flood and famine. Still Elphaba is smart and by the time
she enters Shiz University she becomes a member of a charmed circle of Oz's most promising
young citizens. But in this Oz of deep moral ambiguity Elphaba's world is no utopia. The
Wizard's secret police are everywhere. Animals-those creatures with voices souls and
minds-are threatened with exile. Young Elphaba green and wild and misunderstood is determined
to protect the Animals-even if it means combating the mysterious Wizard even if it means
risking her single chance at romance. Ever wiser in guilt and sorrow she can find herself
grateful when the world declares her a witch. And she can even make herself glad for that young
girl from Kansas. Recognized as an iconoclastic tour de force on its initial publication this
revisionist fairy tale has inspired the blockbuster musical of the same name-one of the
longest-running plays in Broadway history. Popular indeed. But while the novel's distant
cousins hail from the traditions of magical realism mythopoeic fantasy and sprawling
nineteenth-century sagas of moral urgency Maguire's Wicked is as unique as its green-skinned
witch. "Maguire did something truly remarkable with this novel in managing to inhabit enlarge
deepen and find new dimensions in a world that had been invented by another writer and in
doing so make something entirely new. It's an astonishing achievement." -Phillip Pullman
"Gregory gets the complications and uniqueness of women very well."- Kristen Chenoweth "It's a
staggering feat of wordcraft made no less so by the fact that its boundaries were set decades
ago by somebody else. Maguire's larger triumph here is twofold: First in Elphaba he has
created (re-created? renovated?) one of the great heroines in fantasy literature: a fiery
passionate unforgettable and ultimately tragic figure. Second Wicked is the best fantasy
novel of ideas I've read since Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast or Frank Herbert's Dune. Would that
all books with this much innate consumer appeal were also this good. And vice versa." -Los
Angeles Times
