Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West is a history of that villain we all love to hate from the L. Frank Baum children’s classic, The Wizard of Oz. I hate to write a completely negative review, so I’ll start with something good. I finished it. Even that is not saying so much, since I rarely abandon a book in mid-read.

My most lasting impression of Wicked is that it just doesn’t fit with the characters as I know them. In this book the Wizard is a corrupt tyrant; the Wicked Witch of the East is an (admittedly disliked) political leader and religious influence in Munchkinland; Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, cares more about fashion and society than true good works; and the central character, the Wicked Witch of the West, is not really wicked, nor is she technically even a witch, though she is still decidedly green. The lengthy philosophical discussions of politics, religion, animal rights, the nature of evil, and the presence or absence of souls felt empty and out of place with the colorful and imaginative Oz I love. Here, Oz seems dreary and unrecognizable. I don’t dislike philosophy, but I missed the fantasy. In author Gregory Maguire’s telling, life in Oz is bleak.

I had hoped this book would give me a new appreciation for why the witch (named Elphaba—a take on L. Frank Baum’s initials) is the way she is. What I got instead was a mostly uninteresting character whose story went nowhere. I admire the attempt to humanize a villainess, but presenting her as a (somewhat) complex and (somewhat) sympathetic character makes her actions against Dorothy, not all of which are documented here, so much the less believable. Sometimes the villain just needs to be a villain! Confusingly, Maguire has taken too many liberties with the original The Wizard of Oz, ignoring some key scenes and reinventing others to suit his purposes.

It’s nearly impossible to separate this book from its roots in the work upon which it purports to be based, but even as a stand-alone novel, it fails. Maguire hints at ideas and plot points that either never come together or are completely abandoned. The bottom line is that I love books I can’t put down. This one put me to sleep. Literally. I finished it, but only because I really wanted to like it and hoped for some redeeming conclusion. It simply did not live up to the potential of its intriguing premise.