As in Wicked, no single character is purely good: the goodies are bad, the baddies are good, previously encountered characters insist on preserving their moral ambiguities and the whole thing will set your head spinning, if you let it. Elphie was far from perfect, and so too is her son Liir. But whereas the main theme of Wicked was righteousness and hypocrisy, Son of a Witch seems more concerned with fallibility as a universal and humanizing trait. Like its prequel, Son of a Witch abounds with atrocities, brutality and betrayal, with a good dash of the simply gruesome. Though Elphie is not alive in this book, her spirit, we are told in numerous ways, lives on. Then through his enlisting in the army of Oz and his gradual embroilment in the politics and control of the Land of Oz. The story flashes back to his encounter with Dorothy after her killing of the Witch, and follows him for a decade, from his meeting with a sentient elephant trapped in the body of a tribal princess - who lays upon him the task of assisting her to regain her elephant form before she can die - through his attempt to locate his possibly half-sister and childhood companion Nor in a dismal Emerald City prison. The Wicked Witch of the West, who was the protagonist of Wicked. In this sequel, the protagonist is Liir, probably (but no one knows for sure) son of Elphaba a.k.a.
The same sense of duty made me read Son of a Witch.
I felt duty-bound to read it all the way through, though I disliked it from moment one. People just kept thrusting the book at me, because I’m a known Oz freak, and an intellectual, and it was supposed to be a good book.
I don’t think I’ve ever disliked a book more and yet owned three copies of it. I’ll come straight out and say that I did not like Wicked. Wicked did very well, and has been enjoying success in its Broadway incarnation, which I have got to see someday, because for the life of me I don’t understand how any musical based on that book could be enjoyable. If you liked Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, you will probably like its sequel, for here is more of the same.
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