ELPHIE by Gregory Maguire (2025)

★ ★ ★ ★ .5 - equal parts bleak & beautiful, devastating & delightful, & the only way Elphie's childhood could have truly been; Maguire continues to refuse to write down to readers' expectations…

““Water come to ice, come to air, leave the pot on a hot morning and come down again on a rainy afternoon. It always moving even when it look stopped and still. That what hex is.”

“So why did you say I was hexed?” asks Elphie.

“Why I say it yesterday and why I say it today, could be two different things,” explains Boozy. “That the whole idea. Things change. You change. … Green little girl on the outside, who know what on the inside. Maybe she a piece of green moon fell on the ground… She hexed. She raw. It not a good thing it not a bad thing. Don’t fret about it.””

title: Elphie: A Wicked Childhood

author: Gregory Maguire

published: March 2025

publisher: William Morrow

genre/subgenre: literary fantasy—classic literature retelling ‘The Wizard of Oz’

setting: Oz—Quadling Country

main themes/subjects: sibling relationships, family dynamics, culture barriers & misunderstandings, individualism & interiority, the role of even our earliest childhood days in forming our conception of our selves & our identities (both internal & externally-facing), missionary lifestyle, personhood & the personhood of Animals, hexes, wicked children, “Knowing”, forgiveness & absolution, destiny & agency, seers, magic mirrors/crystal balls, wings, rituals

representation: disabled, neurodivergent, “non-white”, & Indigenous-coded characters, queer author

summary/blurbs/premise: The story of Elphie’s childhood beginning with her family’s move to Quadling Country & ending with her leaving for Shiz.

“Like any other thirteen-year-old girl, and like no other, Elphie is swamped in her own self, Elphie. Impetuous. Rational and superstitious at the same time. Attuned to injustice if metered out against herself, but unlike many kids at the vulnerable moment of near adolescence, she is also alert to oppressions that others have to endure…

At nighttime, after she has sung Shell to sleep, she coils in her own sheets, twisted as a nautilus, in a birth clench, waiting to be real, to be something other than herself, waiting to be herself. No different from any thirteen-year-old human child. No different, and so different.”

my thoughts:

In Wicked, we see the culmination of Elphaba’s journey from her birth to her untimely “ending” at the hands of the blue-frocked child-traveler from Kansas. A journey that sees the effects of her experience of the isolation enforced upon her by dint of her appearance (& her neurodivergency), by the prejudice & relegation to the status of “other” at every stage of her life, as relationships are strained & destroyed by all manner of circumstances & situations over which Elphaba has little to no control & yet which she cannot help but see as the product of a fate insidiously turned for some malevolent purpose against herself.

In Elphie, we delve even deeper into the origins of this tragic, inherited & ptsd-induced brand of narcissism. And wowee. I was not expecting such a bleak & brutal origin story but I think that was definitely my fault—after all, name a more chronically misunderstood, mercilessly villainized heroine than our Elphaba.

At the end of it all, pretty much all I could do was bow down to Gregory Maguire’s absolute refusal (much like Oyeyemi’s) to write down to a reader’s expectations. & once you acknowledge that, what we are left with is one of the most devastating & yet also insistently beautiful novels I have ever read.

writing style: the writing, like always, was stunning.

characters: relevant only in-so-far as they were noticed or important to Elphie’s view of the world around her & her place in it—or rather, what she could make of it or herself given its limitations & limiting of her person. The narrative voice (a mysterious entity/ies) is observing the events of Elphie’s childhood as though distantly, or as refractions back & forth through time.

story/plot: subtle… though I do think it was there (the meeting with Chaloti’in felt like the end of the climax). I’ll have to think more about it & reread it about a thousand times, obviously.

worldbuilding: honestly, while Maguire’s writing style is absolutely flawless, his worldbuilding—particularly in this novel—was truly spectacular. The entirety of the book takes place in various locations around Quadling country & each place was simultaneously bleak & beautiful in its own way. Elphie’s childhood living in a tent in the upper swamplands, her teenage years sneaking lessons from the school & working for the local tailor in Ovvels, & then the final years of her childhood in Qhoyre before leaving for Shiz, all included some of the most vivid descriptions of place & setting I’ve ever encountered in a book.

“Elphie won’t remember any of this actual talking. She is slow to speak herself, according to family legend. But with what other tool does she have to consider the start of everything? Words, words alone, and the lustrous peril of the wicked world.”

philosophy: much like the plot, this part too was extraordinarily subtle. I’m honestly so grateful for Maguire for taking this project on when I can only imagine trying to come up with an apporpriate origin story for such a character as Elphaba must have been daunting in the extreme. I may not have picked up on everything in this book but by the end I did have a very strong feeling of the rightness of the whole thing, as though thinking: yes, this is the way it was—the only way it could have been.

notable elements: as the daughter of a minister & with many (like, a disturbing number, really) of missionary extended family members, I was personally interested in those elements of the story which would have otherwise probably niggled me to distraction. I saw a lot of curiosity, empathy, humanity, & absolutely no apologism in that part of the book though.

i would recommend this book to readers who have a strong afinity for the real Elphaba Thropp & aren’t merely enthusiasts of the musical &/or film adaptation. this book is best read… I happened to have read this in early Spring when it was quite muddy & muggy outside & I really think it helped me to get into the mood & atmosphere of the book extemely well.

““There’s something inside us that makes us turn out this way,” says Neri-neri. “The thing that was around waiting to house in us before we were born, and that will linger after we die. We don’t know what to call it, and maybe it doesn’t have a name. But it’s different for all of us—it makes a Ski’ioti out of me, not a snail or an egret or a grasshopper. It makes a boy out of your brother. Out of you it makes a secret.””

final note: absolutely thrilled that I still have six books left from this series to read. <3

CW // animal (& Animal) death & cruelty—quite a bit of it

season: Spring/Summer—or whenever you have your muddiest, muggiest weather…

music pairing:

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further reading:

• The Wicked Years books (Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, & Out of Oz) & their spin-offs: the Another Day series (The Brides of Maracoor, The Oracle of Maracoor, & The Witch of Maracoor) by Gregory Maguire (1995-2025)

• THE STOLEN HEIR by Holly Black (2023) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

• Wednesday (2022, Netflix)

• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, both the penguin classics edition with the Introduction by Jack Zipes & this facsimile edition of the original 1900-published first edition of the book

  • ★ ★ ★ .5 → my review contains links to & information about tons more TWWOO-adjacent readings & retellings…

• The Annotated Wizard of Oz edited by Michael Hearn

• CONFESSIONS OF AN UGLY STEPSISTER by Gregory Maguire (1999) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ —another of Maguire’s books that deals with sibling/family/parental relationships

• The Wizard of Oz (1939 film): “the MGM production in 1939 with Judy Garland … first telecast to millions of viewers in 1956…”

• Wicked (2003 Broadway musical)

• Wicked: Part One (2024 film adaptation of the musical)

• The Worst Witch, a 2018 live performance installation by Mandy Harris Williams, Alima Lee, & Devin Troy Strother (They used to have photos & a transcript from the performance posted here but I don’t see them anymore so maybe they’ll update them later or it will be rereleased? Idk but I’ll let y’all know if I hear anything! I saw this in 2020 & it was phenomenal.)

• Fairy Tales and The Art of Subversion by Jack Zipes (1983)

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“In the dark all cats are grey, goes the saying. In the dark, no children are green.

Asleep, all children appear innocent. But Elphie is often awake.”

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Quotes, Notes, & Annotations…