Wicked. Gregory Maguire

Wicked.
Gregory Maguire.

An awful and tedious perversion of the Oz story. I can think of nothing to recommend it: the writing is ostentations, the characters are ridiculously unbelievable, the plot is both boring but also beyond belief and contradictory to Oz.

The whole idea is telling the story of the Wicked Witch of the West. However, if one is going to write a book using the characters, setting, AND plot from another novel, one ought to follow the rules set by the previous author. Wicked takes the wonderful world of Oz and its rich characters, and turns it/them into a soap opera complete with useless drama, pointless sex & perversions, cardboard characters who don't act like normal--or even abnormal--humans, sophomoric moralizing, etc. etc.

This is a best-seller, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. There can't be that many people who hate the Oz books so much they'd like to see them destroyed like this.

The Mainland. E. L. Grant Watson

The Mainland.
E. L. Grant Watson
Alfred A. Knopf: 1917

The first half of this book is excellent. Grant Watson excels at a few things: intense psychological suspense, interesting nature writing, and mysticism. All of these are present and strong in the beginning of the book, and I had high hopes of a book as good as Lost Man.

After John's heartbreak, however, the book turns into a sort of epic, rather than a detailed description of his attempts to get Mrs. Cray back &/or is utter annihilation. Instead, as John grows and matures (he was raised on an island with only his parents), the intensity of both his emotions & Watson's writing lessens, and the detailed descriptions become more generalized (as John himself is learning to generalize.) Stylistically, this is successful, and it is still a very good novel, but I miss the intensity, the mystical response to nature, and the suspense, that was present in the first half. Grant Watson needed to have John be that intense as a youth in order to show his mellowing and maturing as an adult--perhaps I just miss my own intense youth...?