Satan Reviews- Books: Wicked

Wicked

Gregory Maguire

Usborne Publishing

Beware of spoilers and swears.

Overall review: I honestly had no idea what the author was saying for most of the book.
I don't know if it was the choice of words or the often awkward phrasing, but I feel as if I've missed half of the story. If I could understand the entire novel, I still would have missed large parts of the novel due to the ten year time jump. And the five year time jump, then the 15 year time jump. As apparently nothing of interest happened during these times, although interesting things related to the story did happen. We were told by characters reminiscing about these times.
Some might say that this was the author showing that he was excellent at showing rather than telling, but I found it rather tedious.

Reading most of this book was just ugh. Which is a shame, because I love the musical...'s soundtrack. I've never seen the musical, please someone buy me tickets for a show in England
The start just dragged. I had to check in the dictionary what a lot of the words used meant, and when I did find the definitions, I was still confused. I don't like reading books that make me feel stupid, and this book at times made me feel like a fucking moron.

Detailed review (some NSFW):  Before reading this book, I had no idea how different the book and the musical were. I obviously knew that there would be differences, there always is, but I often questioned how they were related.

One aspect of the novel that I didn't see the point of was the Clock of the Time Dragon, other than scaring the reader's mind with the image of a man with two dicks fucking a widow and her daughter; then suggesting revealing that surprise, surprise, the antagonist of the novel was the protagonist's father. It wasn't in most of the novel and we were meant to remember it throughout even though it had little significance to the overall plot.

Many questions the book makes you ask are never answered.

1) Why is Elphaba's skin green?
I'm assuming that the Miracle Elixir is green, because it is in the musical and I can't remember whether it is in the book and there's now way in hell I'm going to check in the book, I'm not torturing myself like that again but I don't see how that would make an unborn child's skin green. Even if Melena drank it in excess, it shouldn't affect a fetus, a most likely not yet conceived fetus, especially to that extent.

2) How does Elphaba not remember having a child/ being pregnant or never notice that her body would have gone through changes related to being pregnant/ having a child?
Because really? No idea at all. She didn't question the nuns or whatever lumping her with Liir. Did he not remind her of either Fiyero or herself?

3)What was going on for most of the novel because I don't know.
Basically.

I hated most of this book and I had to force myself to finish it because I had gotten into a habit of doing abandoning books halfway through. It started to get better at The Murder and Its Afterlife (chapter 5 so around page 400/495) and then it all went downhill when Dorothy was close to the castle.

The ending felt incredibly rushed, like the author was trying to finally end this awful book and tie off all loose ends and failing just like I do when trying to end book reviews. It's a shame that this book was so bad because it had a great premise and inspired a brilliant soundtrack musical.

I gave this book 2 out of 5 stars.