Son of a Witch

The Uncertain Heir

Son of a Witch opens with Liir, badly injured, found near death in the wilderness — and the novel slowly reconstructs what happened to him in the decade since Elphaba’s death at the end of Wicked. Maguire’s structural choice to begin in medias res, piecing together the past through memory and unreliable recollection, reflects the novel’s central concern: Liir doesn’t know who he is, and the book’s forward movement is his uncertain search for an identity he may or may not be able to claim.

The central question — is Liir Elphaba’s son? — is never definitively answered, and this is not a narrative weakness but a deliberate philosophical position. In a sequence of novels about how identity is imposed and contested, leaving the Wicked Witch’s possible heir without certainty about his parentage is entirely consistent.

A Darker Oz

The Oz of Son of a Witch is further along its political deterioration than the Oz of Wicked. The Wizard has been replaced, but what replaced him is not better — the religious fundamentalism that was a background threat in the first novel has become dominant, Animal rights have been further eroded, and the mechanisms of state violence are more openly practiced.

Maguire is interested in the speed with which political repression normalizes — how quickly citizens adapt to atrocity when it is directed at groups they have been taught to distrust. Liir’s wandering through this landscape gives the novel its episodic structure: he encounters the consequences of Oz’s political choices in specific communities and specific bodies.

The Coming-of-Age Without a Model

What distinguishes Liir’s story from a conventional fantasy coming-of-age is that he has no model to follow. Elphaba’s legend precedes him wherever he goes, but the legend is useless to him as a guide — he is not her, may not even be her son, and cannot inherit her courage through bloodline. He must find his own version of resistance, which is slower, less glamorous, and more genuinely his own.

Our rating: 3.8/5 — A worthy sequel to Wicked that deepens the political vision of Maguire’s Oz while offering a more introspective and less immediately compelling protagonist than Elphaba.

Inheriting a Legend

The structural problem Son of a Witch sets itself is one of the most interesting in the entire Wicked Years sequence: how do you write a protagonist whose chief inheritance is someone else’s legend? Liir exists in the long shadow of Elphaba, and that shadow falls on him whether or not he is actually her son. People expect things of him because of who they think his mother was; they project onto him the courage, the wickedness, the significance they attached to her. Liir, who is none of these things in any settled way, must construct a self in the space between his own ordinariness and the extraordinary story he may or may not have descended from.

Maguire makes the right and difficult choice never to resolve the question of paternity and maternity definitively. In a sequence so preoccupied with how identity is imposed rather than discovered, a clean revelation about Liir’s parentage would betray the books’ deepest concerns. Liir’s uncertainty is the point. He cannot inherit Elphaba’s meaning; he can only, slowly and uncertainly, make a meaning of his own.

The Mechanics of Repression

The novel’s most chilling material is its anatomy of how a society slides further into authoritarianism. The Oz of Son of a Witch has moved past the Wizard’s relatively cynical regime into something more ideological and more dangerous — a state in which religious fundamentalism and ethnic scapegoating have become instruments of governance. Maguire is interested in the ordinary texture of this descent: not the dramatic atrocities but the small accommodations, the averted eyes, the speed with which the unthinkable becomes routine when it happens to people one has been taught not to count.

Liir’s episodic journey through this landscape functions as a kind of moral cartography. He encounters the consequences of Oz’s choices in specific places and specific bodies, and his halting responses to what he sees — sometimes brave, often inadequate — make him a more honest figure than a conventional hero would be.

A Quieter, Harder Book

Son of a Witch is a less immediately gripping novel than Wicked, and Maguire seems to know it. Liir cannot generate the charge that Elphaba did, and the book’s elliptical structure and introspective protagonist ask more patience than its predecessor. But it is a worthy continuation, deepening the political vision of the sequence and insisting, against the grain of most fantasy, that moral courage is not bequeathed by bloodline but has to be found, painfully, by each person alone.

Inheriting Elphaba’s Shadow

Son of a Witch (2005), the second of the Wicked Years, follows Liir, the boy who may or may not be Elphaba’s son, as he tries to make sense of the legacy of a mother he barely knew in an Oz grown more repressive and politically poisonous. Maguire trades the operatic energy of Wicked for a quieter, grimmer study of inheritance and complicity, as Liir drifts through a militarised regime, takes up the broom and the responsibilities it implies, and slowly grows into a reluctant moral agent. The novel’s interest is less in spectacle than in how ordinary people accommodate or resist tyranny, and how the children of legends are forced to live in their shadow.