The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective.
~ Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror
“I hate to be obvious,” added the Scarecrow, “but you’d have saved yourself a heap of trouble if you weren’t too cheap to invest in a leash, Dorothy.”
~ Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch
American author Gregory Maguire was born on this day in 1954 in Albany, New York. His most illustrious novels are adult adaptations of classic children’s stories such as L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, 1995), Cinderella (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, 1999), the Grimm fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Mirror Mirror, 2003), and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” (Matchless: A Christmas Story, 2009).
One of my favorite authors, Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone, included in my 15 Books), said this about Maguire’s Wicked: “I fell quickly and totally under the spell of this remarkable, wry, and fully realized story. Maguire’s adult fable examines some of literature’s major themes: moral ambiguity, the nature of evil, the bittersweet dividends of power, the high costs of love. Elphaba – the Wicked Witch of the West – is as scary as ever, but this time in a different way: She’s undeniably human. She’s us.”
Son of a Witch (2005) and A Lion Among Men (2008) followed Wicked and, to date, comprise Maguire’s Oz series, The Wicked Years. The highly anticipated fourth and final “Oz” book Out of Oz will be released on November 1, 2011.
William Wallace Denslow, 1900
