Son of a Witch and Lost by Gregory Maguire

Okay, I read these two books to kind of make up for the fact that I couldn't get my hands on a copy of his 'Wicked!' novel without buying it - this being a book for my book club this month.  And I am so pleased I didn't fork over any money.

This guy has a great imagination but his style of writing I found so utterly frustrating.  I started with 'Son of a Witch' which is a loose sequel to 'Wicked!' and for probably the first 150 pages I was simultaneously flipping back to his map of Oz to find out what and where he was talking about, and tearing my hair out at yet another new character/race/religion/leader/family member that the author drops in with no warning or explanation.

I got the distinct feeling that we the reader should already know what goes on in the author's head so bugger the buildup of descriptive explanations normal books utilise.  Who do we think we are?

I actually found a copy of 'Wicked!' in the bookshop and sat down to read the first few pages of that offering and even though I knew his version of the land of Oz and a few characters by then, I was still as lost as ever and immediately frustrated because of it.

To be fair though, there is something in the story and I enjoyed the second half of the book, but that was only after I finally had all the setting sorted out and I had yelled for long enough at the book.

Now, 'Lost' is also based on an existing story, this one being 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens, and the premise is that the main characters ancestor was really the inspiration for the Ebenezer Scrooge character, having met the young Dickens and told him of his ghostly encounters when he was young.

The problem here, apart from the similar frustrating style of 'I'll just jump into my narrative and let the reader catch up later' is the fact that the main girl, Winifred Rudge, is a complete and total loser.  I hated her character.  She suffered a loss in her past and she hasn't let it go, she hasn't moved on with her life, and she walks around being miserable and making others miserable but all the while she thinks she is normal and it is others who are acting oddly.

Now, I've come across this before where the author writes a totally self-indulgent whiny lead character and it makes me hate them and therefore the whole book every time.  Why do they do it?

This one also has a better second half but Winnie is still her own bitter twisted self and nothing can really help the story, although I must say the ghost in the story pulls off self-centredness with aplomb.

To summarise, Gregory Maguire has taken well-known stories and twisted them into his own vision and expanded on them or used them as a base for his own tales but he hasn't necessarily pulled this off to the standard I require in a good book.

I am still intrigued to read 'Wicked!' one day, I already know the setting and the characters so it should make it easier, but I'll be buggered if I will spend $28 on it.  If I want to pay money to be frustrated, I'd rather buy an early Gus van Sant movie.