I loved it when I was alive.

I loved it when I was alive, too.

Forget us, forget us all, it makes no difference now, but don’t forget that we loved it when we were alive.
 
a book can be an elegy! an absence can be a presence!

this book feels like its working through a lot of ideas, like the last. a very internal book, concerned with what comes after the world as oz knew it, and the fairy tale as we knew it. the witch is dead, but she still lives. oz still lives, in its beauty and horror, and it is deeply in turmoil. you can’t just cut off fascisms head, you need to burn the body to ash and rebuild, or three more heads will grow in its place.
a book that is about legacy, and being haunted by severed relationships and incomplete work, feeling moorless and alone in adulthood, the necessary pain of sometimes returning to the places you came from with a new perspective.

The colossal might of wickedness, he thought: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.

this book meanders in a way that intellectually i can see could be frustrating but i found fascinating. i love lingering on the little people of oz, ruminating on the patterns of liirs life and generational pain and struggle against authority and for identity, on missed opportunity and love. i relish being deep enough in a world to know about the shatter-ice flower that heralds spring and why liir named that hill he crossed on a journey across oz nether how. and i enjoy the prose in these books. i think it’s very rich and lush and descriptive but still wry and cuttingly funny, and aware of reflections of the world.

it’s very interesting metatextually that this, and the books to come, came after the musical. it’s presence in this is pretty cute generally — allusions and discreet maybe-references, and of course the looming possibility: elphaba lives in the musical. does she live here?

Glinda raised her chin. “No, Liir. She lives. People sing of her. You wouldn’t guess it, being you—but they do. There’s a musical noise around her name; there are things people remember, and pass on.”

it could certainly be argued that the further ambiguity is cast on the witches death — but are those sources to be trusted? rebellious gravity sparked or simply taken on by a once-child who once-knew her? the ramblings of old women? that music lingering in the air? elphaba could live, or she couldn’t, either way: she’s out of the story. or is she? i loved that, that ambiguity, that fairy-tale wondering of which telling leers closer to the truth. one of my favorite things about oz. our modern myth.

i just had a good and stimulating time reading this. like the last book i grew terribly fond of the protagonist, our boy-broomist, our fledgling, the eye of the witch. and like the last book i found myself swept with emotion at certain moments: the horror of southstairs and liir's campaign in qhoyre, glinda's appearances in her gilded cages, the confrontation and joining with trism, that very last line --she cleaned up green. a promise of a line, for a further entangling of this world and this family that is so significant in it. i think back to wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the west, and one of the first portents of the series, from that curious agent of the narrative yackle:

“I have supreme confidence in this woman, Melena, and you should too.”

“Why should I?” said Melena, swallowing the first of nine capsules. It tasted like boiled marrow.

"Because Yackle predicted greatness for your children,” said Nanny. “She said Elphaba will be more than you credit, and your second will follow suit. She said not to give up on your life. She said history waits to be written, and this family has a part in it.”