Every time I saw the cover to Gregory Maguire’s sequel to Wicked, “Son of a Witch”, I’d start hearing the cowbells and baseline to Nazareth’s ‘Hair of the Dog‘. That’s about the only pleasure I got out of reading this 300+ page piece of dreck. While “Wicked” was the brilliant story of the Wicked Witch of the West’s freedom-fighter efforts to protect the rights of Ozlanders from the tyrant Wizard, “Son of a Witch” is the story of her (possible?) son … who does nothing of consequence, and then laments about it.

I have a litany of problems with this book, but I’ll keep this list to 3:

1) Liir, the protagonist (?) does nothing in 300 pages. The author paints Liir as a neutral party – left to his own devices to decide if he’s good or bad. But Liir’s reticence to do anything or help anybody was only interesting in it’s ability to make the book completely boring. The few clearly-defined aspects of his character are inconsistently adhered to. He’s neglected and uneducated, but can apparently read and speak multiple languages. At one point he willingly ends up in the employ of the soldier that kidnapped his childhood love. He has a flying broom but walks everywhere. He desperately wants to save Nor, but can’t be bothered to actually find her.

2) Things are happening in Oz, and the author goes into hyperfocused long boring political and theological detail, but then Liir takes off for four years and someone new has overthrown the government or something – he never sticks around long enough in one place for us to find out. I can’t help but think that we were supposed to make some allegorical connection to current events or something, (the ‘Library Journal’ review, on the front page, claims this book is ‘political satire’) but I don’t get it.

3) The author clearly wrote this book with a well-worn thesaurus next to him. While 99% of the book is written in plain English, at least once per page there’s an obscure word thrown in sideways without any context to it’s meaning. A few $6 words that stood out just by leafing through:

• retractional pluperfect subjunctive
• propitiation
• pogroms
• pollarded
• epibolically

While I’m usually pretty good at sussing out the meaning of a word (I just came from reading a book thick with Patois), I just gave up after a while – the details were so pointless and the story so boring I just wanted to be on with it.