Son of a Witch

Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire

To read Son of... you must first have read Wicked. The tale of a mother who was born good, though frightening, and learned to do some pretty mean things, amongst the good, because she was treated badly by most. A tale of cause and effect; of gain and loss; of possibilities and problems in Oz which mirrors our world of the 21st Century as Frank Baum's Oz mirrored the early 20th.

Now comes a son, though you don't know it and neither does he.  Is he Elphaba's own?  Is he the child of the Wicked Witch of the West?  He is not green.  He has no magic. He is as unsure of himself as she was sure of hers.

Like Wicked, this is a fascinating read placing you in a land that seems one moment like the Oz of Judy Garland, and the next the same land but with an all too REAL reality.  As the movie went from black and white to color when the house dropped on Munchkinland, so this tale goes back and forth from light to dark repeatedly. Both books left me rooting for the dark much more than I thought they would.

Elphaba Lives!

-en