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This was extremely disappointing 😭

If you know me personally, you know I grew up in theatre and, up until recent years, it was a giant part of my life. My college minor was even musical theatre! Wicked the Musical was pivotal for me falling in love with theatre, and some years back I read Wicked (the classic novel by Maguire) and, while it wasn't exactly the same as the musical I had grown up loving obviously, I still appreciated seeing where the work came from and enjoyed my time reading it. So when I saw this prequel was coming out, I was SO excited to get to learn more about Elphie, who I have grown up loving so much in varying forms of media. I could not wait to get my hands on it, and when I received this ARC today, I literally dropped everything else I had planned and anything else I was reading to sit and binge this.

This did not deliver how I hoped. First and foremost, the writing did not flow well to me at all. I had an extremely hard time focusing on the book and understanding the story due to: 1.) The incredibly short simple sentences. It was all written so choppy. 2.) It was SO overly flowery that I genuinely had to sit and puzzle together what was even being said (just for it to be nothing relevant most of the time). For example, at one point Elphie's teeth were called "little gems of standard design". Huh??? I know some people love very academic, flowery writing, so perhaps this is just a me issue. For me, it was so unnecessarily difficult to read for absolutely no reason, and a major turn off for the book.

Which brings me to my next issue--nothing happened. If I'm going to read a prequel, I need it to add something to the experience I already knew and loved. Realistically, I was mostly reading this to spend time with and further get to know Elphie, but I don't even feel like I further got to know her, at least not to any degree of importance. At that point, I'm unsure what the point of this was.

Very sad about this one and will be bummed until I get more Elphie content (Wicked movie Nov 22 cannot come soon enough!!!). This one's a 2🌟 from me.

Thanks so much to William Morrow and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!