Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West / Gregory Maguire

The musical Wicked has taken the world by storm. It has a clever story, is endearing, and is filled with roles rich in character. Having seen it performed on stage twice and listened to its signature tunes dozens of times, my curiosity was piqued by certain aspects of the story that I thought certainly must be better explicated in the novel—like, just what was going on with Dr. Dillamond?, what was the spark that brought Elfie and Fiyero together? and what made people call Elphaba wicked? (And yes, don't be confused, this is most definitely an adult novel. You won't want to be reading it to Little Tommy and Suzie at bedtime.)

Let’s just say that the musical is very loosely based on the novel, taking a few ideas and concepts and throwing most of the story out. The reluctant friendship of Glinda and Elphaba is the most compelling element of the novel, and the creators of the musical took that nugget and out of it crafted a heartwarming story for their blockbuster Broadway hit. The novel seems to work until the point they leave Shiz, and then politics, intrigue, and exile take over, bogging the story down in what turns out to be a mushy, and quite frankly rather dull, middle of the book.

Until Dorothy and Toto enter the story in the last hundred or so pages (and Glinda comes back along with them), it’s just not that compelling. The novel only partly succeeds in putting another face on the Wicked Witch of the West—we want to like her, even though the author doesn't give us much to like, but the musical does a much better job at offering Elphaba a soul (something she explicitly lacks in the book). In addition to so cleverly exploiting and developing the love-hate relationship between Glinda and Elphaba, the stage version of Wicked handily explains the origin of the tinman and the scarecrow, something that the novel doesn’t do as neatly.

Would Wicked the novel be the success it has been if it hadn’t been based on L. Frank Baum’s beloved original version of Oz and the nostalgia we have for the Judy Garland movie? Definitely not. But had it never been written we would not have witnessed the Broadway phenomenon that ultimately has overtaken and outshone the novel that birthed it.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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