“Maguire’s work is melodic, symphonic, and beautiful; it is dejected and biting and brave. How great that people flock to these magical novels.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
Bestselling author Gregory Maguire’s remarkable series, The Wicked Years, comes full circle with this, his fourth and final excursion across a darker, richer, more complex landscape of “the magical land of Oz.” Out of Oz brilliantly reimagines L. Frank Baum’s world over the rainbow as wracked with social unrest—placing Glinda the good witch under house arrest and having the cowardly Lion on the lam from the law as the Emerald City prepares to make war on Munchkinland. Even Dorothy makes a triumphant return in Maguire’s magnificent Oz finale—tying up every loose green end of the series he began with his classic Wicked, the basis for the smash hit Broadway musical.
Gregory Maguire is the New York Times bestselling author of the Wicked Years, a series that includes Wicked—the beloved classic that is the basis for the blockbuster Tony Award–winning Broadway musical of the same name and the major motion picture—Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz. His series Another Day continues the story of Oz with The Brides of Maracoor, The Oracle of Maracoor, and The Witch of Maracoor, and his other novels include A Wild Winter Swan, Hiddensee, After Alice, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Lost, and Mirror Mirror. He lives in New England and France.
One of her earliest memories. Maybe her first, it was hard to tell, time was unstable then. Swimming through grass that came up as high as her underarms. Or it may have been new grain not yet roughened by summer. Late spring, probably. Her chin stroked by paintbrush tips of green. Sunk in the world, unable to feel anything but the magic of it. Unable to take part. The field was as wide as the sky, while she was so low that she couldn't see over horizons of any sort. At a small clearing where (she later realized) a farmer's cart or plow might turn around, she came upon the skin of a mouse in the cropped and daisied grass. The mouse pelt was still soft and almost warm. Supple, not leathery. As if some snake or owl had caught the creature and eaten it through a seam, blood and bones and little liver and all, but had tossed aside, nearly in one piece, the furry husk. She had picked it up and dressed her forefinger with it, becoming Mouse. Quickening into Mouse. It had made her feel foreign to herself, and real. Realer. Then the feeling overwhelmed her and with a cry she shuddered the Mouse-shuck off her, away. It disappeared into the grain. Immediately she loathed herself for cowardice and the loss of a magic thing, and she hunted for it until the memory had hardened into a notion of stupidity and regret. She kept the memory and suffered the longing but never again was so real a Mouse, not for her whole life.
