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I have a confession: I wanted to read this book because I saw the Broadway show, and the idea of a Broadway show based on a book based on a movie based on a political satire intrigued me. I heard the book and the show were quite different, so I wanted to see the difference.

The biggest difference is that the show is good, and the book is not. I don't want to be mean to the poor author (Gregory Maguire), who has made a fortune and franchise from this book and ones like it, but it's absolutely terrible. It's a fantastic idea, mind you, but the execution is... embarrassingly bad.

Oftentimes, I read a book and see ways I could never be a writer: the word choice, the cadence, the picture and world and emotions the author paints with language -- the distance between my ability to write a little song and, oh, Mozart.

This book, however, had me thinking differently. It had me thinking, "um, dude, I could totally do that." The characters are flat and stereotypical, the plot is jumpy and contrived, the dialogue is ridiculous, the tone is wildly inconsistent... when it tries to be funny it winks too much, when it tries to be a political tale it's too obvious, and... I could go on and on about its badness.

Take this passage, for example. Not only does it read like the author is framing each paragraph around a $5 word, but also the construction is, well, a little juvenile:

"Journalists, armed with the thesaurus and apocalyptic scriptures, fumbled and were defeated by it. 'A gulfy deliquescence of deranged and harnessed air'... 'a volcano of the invisible, darkly construed'...
     To the pleasure faithers with tiktok affections, it was the sound of clockworks uncoling their springs and running down at a terrible speed. It was the release of vengeful energy.
     To the essentialists, it seemed as if the world had suddenly found itself too crammed with life, with cells splitting by the billions, molecules uncoupling to annihilation, atoms shuddering and juggernauting in their casings.
     To the superstitious it was the collapsing of time. It was the oozing of the ills of the world into one crepuscular muscle, intent on stabbing the world to its core for once and for all.
     To the more traditionally religious it was the blitzkrieg of vengeful angel armies, the awful name of the Unnamed God sounding itself at last--surprise--and the evaporation of all hopes for mercy.
     One or two pretended to think it was squadrons of flying dragons overhead, trained for attack, breaking the sky from its moorings by the thrash of tripartite wings.
     In the wake of the destruction it caused, no one had the hubrir or courage (or the prior existence) to lie and claim to have known the act of terror for what it was: a wind twisted up in a vortical braid.
     In short: a tornado."

I mean, dear god! This is what trying too hard reads like.

The thing that really hurts about this book is that it's such a great IDEA. It *could have been* really really good. I think I finished it because I wanted to see if it ever got good. [It didn't.]

What it did do, however, was make the Broadway show that much more remarkable. First of all, the show changes some crucial details to make it, well, better (and shorter), but more importantly, it demonstrates that the musical theater folks saw something through Maguire's dreadful storytelling -- they saw that the crispy, chocolatey center was worth exploring. So they're already better musicians than me. Given the arc of the Broadway show, they're better writers than Maguire.

I put this book down when I was finished, a bit disappointed in myself for persevering. I picked up Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet and read the first page. That first page was, by itself, better written than the entirety of Wicked.

If you have any interest in this book, watch the original movie, read the book, then immediately go see the Broadway show with the original cast. That's right, the only decent way to experience this book is with time travel. Good luck.