Well, I'm glad I did a little research before this post. It appears that Wicked, Gregory Maguire's first book, is now a runaway hit on Broadway as a new musical. Hmmm. I was hoping to go to NYC this year, anyway. Maybe I should go on and start shopping for tickets.
Anyway, what this post is really about is Maguire's fourth book for adults. And here's what I had written before the research turned up the real news:
Gregory Maguire’s books have been favorites of mine and my older daughter’s and her friends’ since we discovered the first one, Wicked, many years ago. And Wicked, the most ambitious and complex of the bunch, still remains my favorite, although the subsequent ones all have their merits as well. Wicked is a retelling of the story of Oz from the point of view of the Wicked Witch (Elphaba, also the name of my second-oldest cat). Maguire constructs a biography for her and a political situation in Oz, filling in the backstory for the tale of Dorothy that we all know. This book answers the question, Why would the Wizard want the Witch's broomstick, anyway? Once we know her story, the Witch and her actions begin to make sense, and our notions of what is evil, and of what simply gets called evil, are challenged and expanded.
In the second book, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, the questions asked of the Cinderella story have to do with our notions of beauty and ugliness and the values and costs attached to them. Once again our pre-conceived notions come under scrutiny. The third book, Lost, had a similar cover design, but an entirely different plot device.
The fourth was published late last year. Mirror, Mirror takes on the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Maguire sets the characters of this familiar story in the midst of the power struggles between the noble families and church officials of Renaissance Italy. Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, children of the Pope Alexander VI (think about that for a second...), take prominent positons among the characters. Cesare, in reality, was the model for Machiavelli's The Prince; Lucrezia, in this novel, plays the role of the wicked stepmother. And once again we find that the story behind the actions of the wicked is much more engaging than the bland day-to-day sameness which is enacted by the good:
I put my head to one side, criticizing my aging beauty. "Who is fairer?" I begged the mirror to lie and say "No one; you are beautiful as a legend." I knew it wouldn’t lie. But I didn’t expect it to speak, either. . . .
Before I fell to the floor, twitching with disbelief, I saw the child again. . . . In my delusion, she was no longer dead. She had a grave and magnificent expression. I can’t explain it. Puzzled curiosity. A raging patience. An articulate simplicity. A womanliness.
Or perhaps it was that she seemed like one who didn’t worry about what it meant never to be enough. The absence of such a care on her brow filled her with an unearthly beauty that I could neither achieve nor abide.
Maguire doesn’t turn this story around as much as he has others, but his prose is more beautiful than ever, and his treatment of the dwarves, as boulders who become conscious through a sense of loss and unbalance (described below), and who then (in most cases) become more human as people focus on and pay attention to them, is original and thought-provoking:
Seven was less than we were used to being. We had once been the number one more than seven, we clots in the earth’s arteries. But the noisy one left and maybe for need of him we were stricken with attention. When we were only seven, there was something wrong.
It was a matter of balance. There is a smug assurance among pairs, a possibility of completion that other creatures lack. We know enough of the world of beasts and men to see how males burrow and females furrow, but the comfort of pairing isn’t critically dependent on that exercise.
We lived without the caw and twitch of sex, or to date we had. Unaware of parents but for the mothering hills and the smothering sky, we made do with what we knew: each other. We had no names. We couldn’t count until one of us left, and then we learned to count to seven, and to figure odd from even. With a departed companion, there was a looseness to our group. There was a way in which we were incomplete, and, perhaps more alert because of that hunger. . . .
There wasn’t enough of us to go around. It wasn’t 7 who was abandoned, nor any other one of us. It was the all of us, and then we learned to count to seven, and saw that we should be able to count to the next number up, the seven plus one. But we couldn’t, for that one was gone. In his absence, we remembered once again our incompleteness.
We were shorn, softly and without pain, of our assurance. We noticed what was wrong. We began to notice one another.
The appetite for noticing having been awakened, we were ready to notice the girl who fell, faint from hunger and cold, at our threshold.
These are books worth reading. The show, I suspect, is watered down for the kids, and it makes me nervous that the star playing Glinda gets a higher listing than the one playing Elphaba, but I won't pass judgement before I've seen it.
10:15:16 PM 
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