Son of a Witch: A Novel (The Wicked Years)
by Gregory Maguire
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gregory MaguireEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-09-26
ISBN: 0060747226
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Son of a Witch: A Novel (The Wicked Years)
Book Review: Unnecessary Sequel
Summary: 2 Stars
Warning: Some spoilers
Is this really the best Maguire could do?
This novel simply didn't need to be written. I didn't find it as oppressively boring as some people did--it wasn't painful to finish--but neither did it keep me turning pages. The main problem is simply that there's no story. Oh, things happen, but a series of vaguely interconnected events do not make a story. A story is a coherent whole. You can't take out a piece without the entire thing falling apart. I feel like I could have taken three random chapters out of this book, and it wouldn't have made much difference. Might even improve it, since the novel is ridiculously slow in parts. The narrative is frequently clumsy, with Maguire--a seasoned writer--making the sort of mistakes a novice would make. Exposition is delivered in clumsy chunks of internal monologue...and half the time, it's exposition we don't even need. I got the sense he was just trying to fill as many pages as he could. There's no way this book ever would have been published if Wicked had not been so wildly successful.
I liked Wicked. It wasn't perfect, but it was new, innovative and filled with gorgeous prose and characters who--despite their strangeness--felt like real people. Son of a Witch feels as though it was written by a different person...like an exceptionally long piece of fanfiction. Even familiar characters don't feel the same. For instance--in Wicked, Dorothy was earnest, kind, and naive. In Son of a Witch, she alternates between postmodern cynicism and acting like a halfwit, spouting random nonsense.
Liir seems to have no defining characteristics and no coherent internal life. He starts to do something, then gives up or loses interest, starts to do something else, et cetera. First he's looking for Nor, then when he can't find her immediately, he joins the army, then when that doesn't work out, he goes back home, and then decides to go to the Bird conference...and so on. He wanders around Oz with no clear goals, and does a few inexplicable, contemptible things which make him difficult to sympathize with. A character doesn't have to be a driven, Type A overachiever in order to be interesting, but they have to WANT something. Liir doesn't want anything in particular. I felt like he was just passing time, and as a result, whenever I picked up the book, I felt like I was just passing time, too. I didn't feel like I was being taken on a journey, I felt like I was just kind of wandering through a place with interesting scenery. And interesting scenery is not enough to hold up a novel.
Trism initially seemed like a cool character. I mean, he can hypnotize dragons with his voice! But somehow, Maguire managed to make him boring, too. We never actually SEE him controlling any dragons, we just hear about it. And then he hooks up with Liir. Eh? Where did that come from? It's not the homosexuality per se that bothered me--people can swing both ways, after all--but the way it seemed to come out of nowhere. There's zero sexual tension, no sense of an attraction building between them, and no emotional connection whatsoever. And the actual sex is so vaguely described that (as one reviewer put it) you could blink and miss the fact that it happened, leaving me to wonder why Maguire even bothered to include this relationship. Like everything else in the novel, it just kind of happens.
In short, don't buy this book unless you have a lot of time on your hands. If you're not expecting much and just want to keep your mind occupied for awhile, it's not an unpleasant read, but as a sequel to Wicked, it falls far short.
Summary of Son of a Witch: A Novel (The Wicked Years)
Ten years after the publication of Wicked, beloved novelist Gregory Maguire returns at last to the land of Oz. There he introduces us to Liir, an adolescent boy last seen hiding in the shadows of the castle after Dorothy did in the Witch. Bruised, comatose, and left for dead in a gully, Liir is shattered in spirit as well as in form. But he is tended to at the Cloister of Saint Glinda by the silent novice called Candle, who wills him back to life with her musical gifts. What dark force left Liir in this condition? Is he really Elphaba's son? He has her broom and her cape?but what of her powers? Can he find his supposed half-sister, Nor, last seen in the forbidding prison, Southstairs? Can he fulfill the last wishes of a dying princess? In an Oz that, since the Wizard's departure, is under new and dangerous management, can Liir keep his head down long enough to grow up?
For the countless fans who have been dazzled and entranced by Maguire's Oz, Son of a Witch is the rich reward they have awaited so long.
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