Moonshine Mansion

If you have somehow avoided the presence of this work in popular culture, it can be summed up as a retelling of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West. Like the source material, this work is  political. Unlike the source material, Wicked is not a children’s story.
Spoilers Ahoy!

The book starts far removed from the events of the original, before even the Wicked Witch of the West is born. We get to see her parents, their passions and faults, and how that shaped her childhood. The Witch Elphaba’s skin was green from birth, not some attribute of her witchiness. In fact we learn later that it is probably the result of having parents from two different worlds, even though neither her mother nor biological father was green. That green otherness influenced the whole path of her life. We see that in her childhood her father used it to try to win religious converts.

By the time she was off to school she is ill-equipped to navigate the social structure among the other young girls. Her relationship with her roommate, Galinda, starts of fairly antagonistic but does eventually become something warmer. During their time at school, Elphaba becomes interested in Animal rights. In Oz, animals are normal beasts, but Animals have consciousness and sentience. This has social and political implications since the Wizard has started slowly stripping Animals of their rights and displacing them out of society. We start to see the direct impacts of the Wizard’s rule. Elphaba and several friends from the boys’ section of the school work together to help Dr. Dillamond, a Goat, try to show that there is no inherent difference between Animals and humans. Their hope is that if they can show this to the Wizard he will stop treating them so poorly. Sadly the Goat professor is murdered before he can complete his work.

At this point Elphaba, her sister Nessarose, and Glinda are summoned to a meeting with their school headmistress, Madame Morrible. She attempts to conscript them into sorcerous service in the name of the Wizard. She also was the one who had Dr. Dillamond killed. They try to take Dr. Dillamond’s evidence directly to the Wizard, but fail to make any impact. Elphaba becomes radicalized at this point and leaves to join a resistance movement against him, while her sister and friend seemingly fall into the roles Morrible set out for them.

While she is working for the resistance, Elphaba has an affair with Fiyero, who she knew from school. He ends up murdered at the hands of the Wizard’s enforcers because of it. Much of the rest of the book is Elphaba’s journey seeking forgiveness from Fiyero’s family, and slow acceptance of what happened and what the consequences were. For me that is where the heart of this story lies. Why do we have such a need for absolution? How can we give it to others when we can’t for ourselves? Why does it drive us to hope for impossible things?

In the end it is the audacity of innocent Dorothy, asking for forgiveness for the death of Nessarose, that leads to the death of the Witch of the West. Now Dorothy has killed both sisters, and must go out into the world with no one left to offer forgiveness for it. Elphaba saw herself in Dorothy, and it makes you wonder what will become of her now.

I greatly enjoyed this book. My biggest complaint has to do with timing. We have a long time to see the life that led Elphaba to become the Wicked Witch. However that final transition into the part of the story that lines up with the original feels a bit jagged. Perhaps the author has made her too sympathetic, so that by the end I had a hard time reconciling the relatively quick shift to her full Witchdom. Even though you know how this story ends before it even begins, you end up exhausted and heartbroken when you get there.

As you may know by now, and will surely know if you keep reading these reviews until I finish my challenge, I have a bias against sprawling epic fantasy novels. It’s not that I don’t like them at all, but given the choice between fantasy war and political intrigue, and the exact same story but in space with lasers and spaceships, I’ll choose the spaceships every time. I also put off writing this review for a little while after I finished reading, so my recollection will be slightly fuzzier than usual.

Even with all that said, this book was a solid read. This book follows the expansion of an empire, through the eyes of the people on the ground on several sides. There are more than two sides, because in addition to the loyal imperial forces and those of the territories they seek to annex, there are also outside forces with treaties or vested interest in slowing the expansion, and forces within the empire working against it for their own reasons.

Oh and did I mention the gods? They keep getting involved too. This book has a theme of people losing themselves in service to something bigger, whether by their own choice or not. The loyal hand of the empress has given up her own identity to act as a more pure proxy for the empress. A young fisherman’s daughter is possessed by a god of assassins and also the spirit of a murdered witch. Several different characters are possessed or influenced by the god(s) of luck. It began to feel like nobody in the world was acting under their own volition. Maybe that was the point.

There were a few things that helped me get over my dislike of this style of novel and actually enjoy it. For one thing, unlike many fantasy novels that focus on war and politics, there was still plenty of magic in this world. Not just gods walking on earth like legends, but actual battles with wizards flinging spells at each other. I approve. The other thing that made this novel stand out was the characters. Although one was a bit more of a trope than I could take, on the whole the characters in this book were well-written and well motivated. This was good because there were a lot of characters, and the plot occasionally bounced around between them.

Much of the style and characters seem to build directly off of themes from the Elric stories. It made me very glad I had read those before this one. There are a range of characters here, but they all have their personal baggage that defines their personalities and their actions. This book ends with a few crises averted, and more still looming on the horizon. Overall I enjoyed it but probably not enough to keep reading the series.