The long-anticipated sequel to the beloved and hugely successful novel Wicked, now Broadway's #1 smash hit musical
When a Witch dies-not as a crone,
withered and incapable, but as a woman in her prime, at the height of
her passion and prowess-too much is left unsaid. What might have
happened had Elphaba lived? Of her campaigns in defense of the Animals,
of her appetite for justice, of her talent for magic itself, what good
might have come? If every death is a tragedy, the death of a woman in
her prime keenly bereaves the whole world. Ten years after the
publication of Wicked, bestselling novelist Gregory Maguire returns to
the land of Oz to follow the story of Liir, the adolescent boy left
hiding in the shadows of the castle when Dorothy did in the Witch.
A decade after the Witch has
melted away, the young man Liir is discovered bruised, comatose, and
left for dead in a gully. Shattered in spirit as well as in form, he is
tended by the mysterious Candle, a
foundling in her own right, until failed campaigns of his childhood bear late, unexpected fruit.
Liir is only one part of the
world that Elphaba left behind. As a boy hardly in his teens, he is
asked to help the needy in ways in which he may be unskilled. Is he
Elphaba's son? Has he power of his own? Can he
liberate Princess Nastoya into a dignified death? Can he locate his
supposed half-sister, Nor, last seen in shackles in the Wizard's
protection? Can he survive in an Oz little improved since the death of
the Wicked Witch of the West? Can he learn to fly?
In Son of a Witch, Gregory
Maguire suggests that the magic we locate in distant, improbable places
like Oz is no greater than the magic inherent in any hard life lived
fully, son of a witch or no.
