FREE: Wicked - The Novel/Book/Play

The listing, Wicked - The Novel/Book/Play has ended.

AMAZING PLAY - AND BOOK!

Whether you read this book before or after you see the play - or even if you never see this play...you will love the book.

This is a paper back edition in nice condition.

Wicked is about: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, is a parallel novel published in 1995 written by Gregory Maguire and illustrated by Douglas Smith. Based upon the writings of L. Frank Baum and seven authors after him who continued writing the book series, it is a revisionist look at the land and characters of Oz, best known from Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Unlike the popular 1939 movie and Baum's writings, this novel is not directed at children, and contains adult language and content including violent imagery and sexual situations.

It is the first in the Wicked Years series followed by Son of a Witch, published in Autumn of 2005, and A Lion Among Men, published in October 2008. An untitled fourth (and possibly final) novel in the series is forthcoming with no release date as of yet.

An unabridged audiobook, read by John McDonough, was released in 2000. In 2003, the novel became the basis for the Broadway musical Wicked.

The novel presents events, characters and situations from Baum's books and the film in new ways, with many differences between the series and the Wicked Years. These differences arise from the original Oz functioning as a mirror-image of Kansas in a cultural and economic framework: Oz was wealthy, prosperous and had excellent agricultural fields while Kansas was characterized by economic hardship, environmental difficulties and poor harvests. The social strife described in the Wicked Years indicates that the two series are set in similar and internally consistent but distinctly separate visions of Oz. It also sets the reader thinking about what it really is to be "Wicked", and whether good intentions with bad results are the same as bad intentions with bad results.