The witch is back in excerpt from Gregory Maguire's final “Wicked” book, “The Witch of Maracoor”
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Good news! No, it's not that the Witch of the West is dead — quite the opposite.
Gregory Maguire is returning to Oz with his third and final novel in his Another Day trilogy following the life of Rainary Ko, granddaughter of Elphaba, the aforementioned Wicked Witch. The Witch of Maracoor, out Oct. 10, concludes Rain's story as she seeks a way off of Maracoor so that she may return to Oz to right wrongs and seek out her lover, Tip, who still haunts her memories.
EW has an exclusive excerpt from the novel, reintroducing us to Rain, and her status among the people of Maracoor as the whispered about "witch."
The Witch of Maracoor is Maguire's seventh book in this universe, having written four novels in The Wicked Years quartet, including the bestselling Wicked, reimagining the life of the infamous Wicked Witch of the West. Wicked was adapted into a hit musical that opened on Broadway in 2003 (and is still running). Part One of a film adaptation of the musical is set to be released in 2024.
The novel picks up where The Oracle of Maracoor left off, following Rain in the aftermath of a confrontation with her great-grandfather, the one-time Wizard of Oz. More determined than ever, Rain is out to return to her homeland of Oz and settle old scores, with her memory and her passions returned to her. Spell book The Grimmerie still maintains its power over Rain, as does her recollections of her lover. Many of her traveling companions seek to befuddle her as she comes into her own, but Rain is determined to stare down her troubles as she blossoms into an adulthood bursting with fervor and daring.
Read the exclusive excerpt below for more.
Paul Mounce/Corbis via Getty Images; William Morrow Gregory Maguire; The Witch of Maracoor
The Witch of Maracoor by Gregory Maguire excerpt
Any witch worth her ginger is at least somewhat immortal. Trust the word on the street. So much easier to kill her, should it come up — she'll bounce back, one way or the other. They always do.
The Witch of Maracoor. That's what some called her, whether or not she was actually a witch. The Witch of Wherever-It-Is-This-Time. A slur or a compliment, depending. The easier to identify, the easier to dismiss; who cares about her? Let's go get our hands on a jug of beer.
Easy enough to see where the witch label came in. Hardly any deviation from stereotype. That green skin, the self-possession, even the take-no-prisoners manner of walking. ("She stomped herself across the Wool Exchange in that way she has — just so aggressive!") Someone had heard her cursing once in an unladylike way — as if so-called ladies were ignorant of barnyard vocabulary. But was she a witch? How so? Language? Okay. And manners. Attitudes. Little attention paid to her clothes, for instance. Society forgives a woman everything but lapses in taste.
The Witch of Maracoor had appeared as if from nowhere, with her green-apple cheeks and that twitchy broom. Intent on some intrigue. Always unseemly and possibly seditious. Well, but when does a witch go in for community organizing? The singularity of her. She was like no one else.
Or she was like that Elphaba, revived. Perhaps? No? Maybe she was Elphaba, after all, come back from wherever she'd disappeared to. Few remembered the original Wicked Witch of the West from personal experience, but hardly anyone in Oz was agnostic about her. All those stories.
Her name was Rainary, this Witch of Maracoor. Her friends, when she had any, called her Rain. She lived under a cloud, and had done so for a long time. It was beginning to tell on her, though. That's also where witchiness comes in — when temporary scar tissue turns into carapace.
It was the Goose, her familiar, who'd named her the Witch of Maracoor. Possibly it had been a joke. Or he'd been annoyed and in one slip of the beak he'd tarnished her reputation for good, forever. Or maybe he did it on purpose, setting her up to be able to clomp through a mob without having to trade in small talk.
The Goose had a lot to answer for. His name was Iskinaary. He'd flown with her in from — well, from wherever they'd originated. No one was sure.
***
Her thinking had become choked — a mere testing of theorems. Was this uncertainty of hers, Rain wondered flatly — without the usual up-lift of emphasis in a question—just the normal myopia of late adolescence. Or was it the continued aftershock of her accident. Yes, she'd suffered a loss of memory. She remembered dropping the Grimmerie from a great height, but couldn't recall any terror at herself tumbling from the sky against the hard stone of the sea. Nor the moment of impact. Now she wondered if more than her memory had gotten scrambled. She'd misplaced her sense of her own self in some interior way.
What did it mean to be green, for one thing. To be the only one of your kind in all the world. Or was that a universal feeling. The wisp-lipped kid on a leatherball pitch, mocked for a fouled goal, the girl dubious about her new swelling breasts — did any young person ever feel anything other than alone in all the world. Rain didn't know. She'd had too few friends her own age. A servant girl named Scarly, back in St. Prowd's School. And the jack-of-all-trades, Tip, her first love.
Maybe green skin does paint you marginal in a deeper, more irrevocable way. Or maybe every one of us, you too, are mere maggoty pupae behind the hard lacquer of your family ways — your mother tongue, your father silence.
What Rain had awakened to, and to which at dawn she had gone off alone in an effort to accommodate, was the fullest sense yet of her first romance, her lad Tip as he was then known.
In her earliest stages of recovery from amnesia, her sense of him had been imprecise. An impression. This morning she'd come around to the clarity of his presence. His outline against a sunrise. So precise as to be nearly cut in ice. It hurt her mind to look at him again but she knew she must.
At a vernal pond, behind a blind of reeds and clacking palm fronds, she undressed and dropped into the water to her shoulders. Her green nudity at home in the algaed shallows. There he was, in her mind, almost as if shedding his own clothes in order to bathe with her. She couldn't ignore him any longer, even if he didn't exist. Her Tip, her boy.
Adapted from THE WITCH OF MARACOOR by Gregory Maguire, published by William Morrow Books. Copyright © 2023 by Gregory Maguire. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers .
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