She’ll try defying gravity…
Good news!
No, it’s not that the Witch of the West is dead quite the opposite.
Part One ofa film adaptation of the musicalis set to be released in 2024.
Gregory Maguire; The Witch of Maracoor.Paul Mounce/Corbis via Getty Images; William Morrow
Spell book The Grimmerie still maintains its power over Rain, as does her recollections of her lover.
Read the exclusive excerpt below for more.
Trust the word on the street.
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 abouther?
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 soaggressive!")
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?
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.
Maybe shewasElphaba, after all, come back from wherever she’d disappeared to.
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.
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.
Or was it the continued aftershock of her accident.
Yes, she’d suffered a loss of memory.
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.
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.
In her earliest stages of recovery from amnesia, her sense of him had been imprecise.
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.
Her green nudity at home in the algaed shallows.
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.
