REVIEW: It's Not Easy Being Green In 'Elphie: A Wicked Childhood'
- Jessica Haight-Angelo
- Oct 29
- 8 min read
Disclaimer: This review contains minor spoilers for Gregory Maguire’s novel, Elphie: A Wicked Childhood.
In 1995, the Albany, New York-bred author, Gregory Maguire, published his first adult novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West, a 400+ page deep dive into how the title character came to be known by her fearsome moniker prior to the events of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. By 2003, Maguire’s unofficial Oz prequel had sold 500,000 copies and inspired a Broadway adaptation of the same name, whose meteoric popularity is often credited with revitalizing 2000s-era Broadway. That a film adaptation of Wicked took 30 years to come to fruition means that Oz, et al has welcomed yet another generation into its emerald-hued realm of magic and secrets (and secrets about magic!). Amidst the fervor of director Jon Chu’s cinematic Wicked duology - Part 2, aka Wicked: For Good, is slated for theatrical release on November 21st - Maguire’s own (latest, there have been several sequels to the original novel) return to Oz, a prequel to Wicked called Elphie: A Wicked Childhood, was released to the masses back in March of 2025, offering the perfect appetizer before the upcoming Wicked: For Good feast.
In terms of its role within the context of Maguire’s Wicked book series, as Fernanda Figueroa notes in her review via APNews.com, “Maguire takes to writing in short chapters with short sentences” in Elphie: A Wicked Childhood, thus “reflecting the overall dysfunction occurring in Oz and in Elphaba” which creates a narrative “rhythm” that makes the <300-page novel “easy … to breeze through.” Likewise, “Compared to previous books in the series, there is less happening to drive the narrative,” as much of the book “serves as a psychological backstory to understand Elphaba’s character, explaining what made her one of the most iconic witches in literacy, theater and film.” In spite of Figueroa’s insistence that “Elphaba fans … hold space for” Elphie: A Wicked Childhood, however, as Jena Brown puts forth in her own review for The Portalist, that the backdrop of Elphaba’s childhood mandates familiarity with her family members and their nomadic lifestyle (due to Elphie’s father, Frexspar’s vocation as a traveling preacher) somewhat de-centers Elphaba in her own book. Elphie:A Wicked Childhood is not just Elphaba’s story, Brown argues: “It’s also Nanny and Frexspar’s, Nessarose’s and Shell’s,” aka Elphaba and Nessarose’s younger brother who does not appear in the musical and shows up but sparingly throughout the rest of the Wicked book series.
“Elphie is destined to be a witch”
Though the aforementioned Figueroa references Elphie: A Wicked Childhood’s overall “melancholy” as a result of the novel’s “subtle political distress,” Brown argues that the story’s “tension and direction, twists and turns” often lack Elphaba’s own input. For instance, “We see her initial interest in animals, but her drive to understand what happened is muted with a very off-brand desire to not find out.” Here, Brown references a subplot wherein Elphaba is determined to befriend a clan of Dwarf Bears from a nearby settlement who are gradually driven off by locals without Elphaba’s empathy for the Animal population. That she is chastised for her presumed misplaced curiosity until she simply stops broaching the topic, while not how an elder Elphaba tends to respond to social strife, is more in line for one still very much in the throes of adolescence who yet relies on said chastisers for her continued livelihood, such that it is. Even so, Elphie: A Wicked Childhood may tell more than show how the title character’s trademark “delightfully defiant … spark” that makes her such a captivating eventual anti-hero developed amidst the “murkier … reality” of her upbringing. Perhaps, as Brown suggests, briefly showcasing Elphaba’s “aversion to water” and/or “any hint to the shocking revelation of her birth” might have provided deeper narrative insight through exploring “her frustration over her helplessness as a child” as among “the deep roots of the ferocious woman she became.” Without “depth or space given to explore the reactions or impact these events have on the future witch,” Brown argues, “even Elphie herself is lost in the narrative weeds.”
On the other hand, Maguire himself makes a passionate case for the cruciality of understanding Elphaba’s childhood to truly appreciate who she ultimately becomes. Bernardo Sim, in his interview with Maguire for Out.com, references a line from William Wordsworth’s poem, “My Heart Leaps Up” as “one of Maguire’s biggest inspirations for writing Elphie: A Wicked Childhood: ‘The Child is father of the Man,” wherein both Child and Man are enraptured by the “natural piety” of “A rainbow in the sky.” Alas, most adults who dot the landscape of Elphaba’s childhood do, in fact, lose the very wonder and passion for life and justice that later marks Elphaba ironically and tragically as ‘wicked,’ given her refusal to bend to the will of the same sorts of adults who drive Animals off of shared land (and much worse). Here, Maguire offers, “'Elphaba ... may have wanted to revolve 180 degrees from what her father represented - from the shame, the disgrace, the mocking. But she couldn’t shed his influence. But who can? We can’t shed the influence of our parents. So, when Elphaba takes up a lost cause, or what looks like a lost cause, it really is not much different from what her father’s done. It’s directed a different way, but she has similar tenacity, similar drive, and she keeps going even when it looks like she’s not going to make it.'" Likewise, that she is ultimately unable to "fulfill her aims" through little fault of her own makes her story a tragedy.
Maguire downplays Frexspar’s arguably still considerable role in Elphie: A Wicked Childhood, given how “‘annoying, but rounded’” a character he already is in the initial Wicked novel, while simultaneously noting that he “tried to see” Melena (“So close to Melania …”), Elphaba’s mother who passes after birthing Shell, “more clearly.” Ergo, if Elphie: A Wicked Childhood falls short narratively in terms of further illuminating Elphaba herself, it may yet somewhat console readers by showing them how to “lend sympathy backwards to those who raised you, and punished you, and did you a disservice … But who are also just humans.” Caveat: This may necessitate putting Frexspar back in the narrative, so to speak. During his interview with Maguire, the aforementioned Sim draws an “astute” parallel between Elphaba and her father, as “Two people who feel very strongly about what they believe in, experience how Ozians do not care about their causes, and go on to live very isolated lives as a result. Dying on a hill that no one even realized was there.” The interview goes on to reveal that Maguire’s own “long dead - 40 years” father “simply ‘did not take to me,’” and that in spite of his nonetheless having “many happy memories of my father … He wasn’t really comfortable with my being gay,’” or even “‘that I was a happy person. The family atmosphere was kind of morbid after … My mother died in childbirth when I was born.’” Ergo, in spite of Elphie:A Wicked Childhood’s proposed narrative shortcomings, its real life-inspired subtext adds a layer of meaningfulness on par with Jon Chu casting Cynthia Erivo, a Black actress, to portray the othered Elphaba on the silver screen. Case in point: “‘I was the unhappy lynchpin in our family,” Maguire tells Sim, “because, had I not shown up, maybe [my mother] would have lived.’”
Hexes and Vegetables and Fledglings, Oh My!
Overall, Elphie: A Wicked Childhood as art imitating life - both Maguire’s, as well as the novel’s “subtle political undercurrent” (Maguire ruefully refers to 2025 in his interview with Sim as the “‘break everything before it can do any good’” era) - does not make up for the book being “A bit of a slog and a bit of a downer,” though as Kirkus Reviews insists (and which Maguire would almost certainly agree), it is yet “essential” reading “for Elphaba fans.” Indeed, perhaps some of Elphie: A Wicked Childhood’s formulaic devices are a bit too bare bones - the Kirkus review snarks, for instance, that Melena’s premature death is “a standard trope of children’s literature that daughters must live without their mothers,” one unfortunately shared by Maguire himself. Likewise, “of course the absence of love is an essential ingredient in the recipe for producing evil people,” the review proposes, citing the apparent incongruity between Elphie “‘making wishes on falling stars still’” and her later “picking viciously on poor armless Nessa” as proof of her titular wickedness. This is arguably shortsighted, as it fails to acknowledge how Maguire’s narrative deftly avoids definitively pinning the blame for various hardships that befall the Thropp family on either Elphaba, Nessarose, or Shell - that is, all are neglected children with muted magical abilities. As Maguire notes in an interview with Paste Magazine, “things happen,” including plenty of sibling rivalry from all parties involved.
Perhaps it is kindest to consider Elphie: A Wicked Childhood as Maguire’s mostly successful rekindling of his long friendship with the title character, whom he views as a more self-realized version of himself: "'Elphaba is me; she is a better version of me,’” he notes in an interview for Times Union. “‘I'm a late-middle-aged, grumpy-looking[,] not entirely prepossessing Irish man of a certain type. No one can fail to look at Elphaba. She is my hero.'" Likewise, Maguire offers while discussing the novel with People, “‘Elphaba brings many of my [“‘psychological’”] characteristics to a sharper fruition than I’ve been able to do in my own life. I think I'm reasonably sharp and I think I'm reasonably kind, but I'm not as strong. And if I am moral, I'm also more cautious. Elphaba is not so cautious and she strives into situations and takes a certain amount of charge of them, more briskly than I've ever done.'" Even while watching the original 1939 Wizard of Oz film as an annual broadcast during his own childhood, Maguire notes that he “was always struck by the Wicked Witch, played by Margaret Hamilton”: “‘She seemed like the most genuine item on a supermarket shelf … It almost seemed like she was the only one who wasn’t acting.’” Ergo, though Maguire once believed that his own time in Oz “‘was a one-off, as the British say. One and done, done and dusted,’” the seemingly natural conclusion to an obsession culminating in keeping a file folder entitled “Oz Matters” while attending the University of Albany, whose campus “‘loomed mentally on the horizon’” and reminded the young Maguire “‘of Dorothy going to the Emerald City … as the world continued to complicate itself and perplex me, I found I needed to go back to Oz for my own mental health … [it] allows me to remain functional’” (Times Union).
In any case, Maguire seems quite aware that Oz and even Elphaba are much bigger than him, even though he readily admits that “‘Elphaba is my baby.’” In fact, the origins of Elphie: A Wicked Childhood amount to portions of the original Wicked novel which his publisher insisted he cut for length by about seven percent, coupled with worry that his window of opportunity to write a prequel was “‘escaping my hold. I will be dead one day.’” On Wicked’s aforementioned chopping block “‘were the parts when she was 2 to 16 years old. I still think they’re important parts.’” In an interview with The Culture Show, Maguire added that “‘those scenes had to come out because we needed to gallop ahead and get Elphaba and Glinda to meet each other more quickly. So I took those cuttings out. I put them in the basement like one does a hyacinth bulb, and thirty years later I found that there was still life in them. When I planted them, they began to flourish again.'" From there, he told People, “‘I only had to write the first page, about her sitting on a blanket on the edge of a river in Quadling Country, before I felt I had slipped right back to sit next to her, to put my arm around her and almost to be her … I found that since she is part of me, I am part of her, too. The minute I turned my attention to her, I was right back there.’”
Comments