Gregory Maguire is releasing a 'Wicked' prequel, 'Elphie,' about Elphaba's childhood and formative years. Read an exclusive excerpt at Entertainment Weekly.
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Need more Wicked? Read an exclusive excerpt from Elphie, Gregory Maguire's upcoming prequel
"Wicked" author Gregory Maguire pulls back the curtain on Elphaba's childhood in his new prequel novel.
By
Maureen Lee Lenker
Published on March 5, 2025 11:30AM EST
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Gregory Maguire, author of 'Wicked' and its upcoming prequel 'Elphie'. Photo:
Helen Maguire Newman; William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
It couldn't have been easy...
So reflects Glinda of Elphaba's childhood in hit musical
Wicked, now an even-bigger global phenomenon thanks to a two-part film adaptation. Now, fans of the musical or Gregory Maguire's original novel on which the show is based can get a sense of just how difficult things were for a young Elphaba.
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On March 25, Maguire will release
Elphie, a prequel to his original novel that details young Elphaba's adolescence and her coming-of-age prior to her arrival at Shiz and her introduction to the likes of Glinda and Fiyero.
The novel follows the green and all-too-relatable young girl as she is shaped by both her mother Melena's promiscuity and her father Frex's piety. Elphie must contend with ordinary sibling rivalry and jealousy as her siblings, the saintly Nessarose and criminally-minded Shell, come into her life.
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The book also features Elphie's first encounters with the Animals of Oz and the mistreatment of their populations, featuring the ways in which they live adjacent to but not with humans. From her first messy attempts to friendship to her introduction to and love for education,
Elphie traces the molding of a witch, and all the ways she attempts to make do, slip by, endure, and aspire.
Entertainment Weekly can share an exclusive excerpt from the novel, featuring Elphie's early encounters with a monkey that seems to haunt her. Read on for more.
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Karis Musongole played young Elphaba in 'Wicked'.
Universal Pictures
And here, Elphie is alone, herself alone in the center of the camp, outside the tents. It's high noon, though the thick jungle canopy allows too little direct sunlight to prove the moment. Everyone is busy. She doesn’t know why. Nessa has the rheumy chest and is resting in the girls' tent. Ti'imit and Boozy are conferring in Boozy's tent, and the flaps are tied shut and go away, don’t bother us. Nanny is distracted in Melena's quarters. Melena hasn’t gotten up for several days. All on his own, for once, Frex has taken a canoe a short distance upriver for some stores and to suss out the rice market exchange as a source of possible converts. For the first time Elphie feels — well, what is it she feels?
Is it loneliness or is it fear? She isn't sure. There's all this talk of the migration of jungle cats. They steal invisibly through the growth all around her, she can tell. Today the grown-ups have left Elphie alone. Probably in the hopes that she’ll be eaten alive. It isn't fair. Nessa is safe in her cot. Only Elphie, standing in the middle of the circle of tents. Let the cats come and get me. It'll serve you right if I get devoured.
She starts to chant a little. When she was younger, Nanny had sung to her, lullabies and husha-husha songs, but it's been sometime since music marked the silences of camp life. Elphie twists her fingers and makes up some nonsense words.
Seppada seppada meppada me, somebody somebody, twiddledy twee. He-body, who-body, me-body, you-body. Riddle-dee ree. She hardly realizes that she is singing. The words come spring-loaded with a melodic intention so her voice just follows.
And this is when she makes the acquaintance of the polter-monkey.
She doesn't call it that at first. It’s just a creature on the side-lines, crouching. It looks as if it is eating its own knuckles. More or less the size of Nessa — in fact, in the shade, Elphie has thought at first that it is Nessa, somehow hexed into greater mobility — though of course Nessa has no knuckles of her own to bite.
It turns sideways as if it is shy, but it doesn't back away when Elphie takes a half step forward.
"You're a nasty-looking little piece of monkey business,” says the girl.
The monkey swivels its head a quarter-turn and bares its considerable burden of teeth. It isn't a smile, nor has Elphie been trolling for one.
But any monkey knows how to keep itself hidden if it wants to. So this nervy bundle of fuzzy shadow has come forward by its own design. Is it even really there, or is Elphie making it up out of boredom? In any case, the company is welcome. “What? What do you want?” The creature isn’t going to help her figure it out, but still it doesn't flee. It opens its mouth again with a shocking hinged jaw. At first Elphie thinks it is yawning. Then she gets it, maybe, and replies with some more ribbony phrases. “Pumpernickel rock, snickerlicker snock,” she sings. At this the creature drops its curled hands to the ground. It is carrying something in one of them. Its mouth closes and its eyelids lower, as if anticipating sleep. She has sung it out of hiding, that's what she's done.
Better ghost company than none at all. It sways a little and holds its own elbows, a gesture looking uncommonly like one of Nanny's. Out of green jungle air Elphie creates an aria to tease it forward. Having an audience spurs invention. She is forging a crescendo, and the polter-monkey is in a trance. And then —
"Elphie, for the love of Lurline, quit the caterwauling," hollers Nanny. She and Boozy have burst simultaneously from their respective tents because Melena is having a bad dream or something and is screaming. Maybe to drown Elphie out? In any case, before the girl can see how or where, the polter-monkey has disappeared.
She's furious. Leaving her alone all morning, and just when something decent is happening, messing it up.
"Boozy, some coconut oil or turtle butter, I have to get the rings off her, she's complaining of the pressure. Elphie, tend to your sister!"
Elphie will go try out her new gambit of singing on her sister, who has been awakened by Nanny's shouting and is braying for attention and service. But first Elphie skirts the grass where she thinks she's seen that creature. On the ground lies the small pair of tongs that has gone missing.
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In the evening light, Nanny tells Elphie that she may bring her little sister around so they can visit with their mother, who is feeling poorly today.
"Today and every day," says Elphie, who doesn't understand the difference between poor and poorly— nor between poor and prosperous, for that matter.
Melena is in a state of dishabille, but this is normal for her. The girls might not have noticed except that there is so very much exposed belly. "
Somebody eat a big lunch," says Nessa.
"Come to Mama," says Melena. Her hair is lank across her pillow. She's thrown up a little. Nessa wrinkles her nose when Elphie wheels her closer. Melena stretches out her arms.
"What happened to your rings, they ran away," says Nessa, peering at her mother’s fingers. Having none of her own, Nessa always attends to her mother's.
"They just bounced right off didn't they," says Nanny. She is preparing a basin of warm water and soap and folding a stack of small flannels.
"I couldn't bear the chafing." Melena's face twists. Nanny mutters some coded instruction, Melena grits her teeth against the ailment but comes back to herself. “Elphie, are you filching things from here and there? Boozy and the others tell me objects are developing lives of their own and walking about to take the air.”
"No."
"You’d say no in any case. Just cut it out, Elphie." Melena flags a hand limply at her older daughter as Nanny hoists Nessa onto the edge of the cot, where the girl lies, inert and cringing, in the lee of the tumulus that Melena has become. "Nessa, tell me," says their mother, "is Elphie being a good big sister to you?"
Nessa shrugs. One of the more expressive bodily gestures she can make.
"I want you to be good, Elphaba Thropp," says Melena. She says it twice more until Elphie finally lifts her chin and looks her mother in the eye. "I haven't said so before, but I'm saying so now. I want you to tell me that you hear me."
"Oh, I
hear you," says Elphie, too young to have perfected the withering ennui of adolescence, but practicing.
"You hear me and you remember what I say."
"I found the missing tongs in the grass." Elphie takes them out of her pocket.
"I know you be’d the one to snitch them," says Boozy, who’s arrived with some malodorous tea. "Give them here, you pinching thief."
"I never did, I never stole them or hexed them or anything'd them." Elphie, hot in the cause of justice for herself. "I think there’s a lone monkey hanging around the camp. It's been taking things."
"The monkeys all fled, swum away through the trees, they don't like jungle cats no more than we do," says Boozy. "They smart and they keep to their own kind. No rogue monkey hanging around us, Elphie."
"Elphie, don't spout nonsense, you're making it worse," says Nanny. "Stop taking things, that's all. Now give your mother a kiss. She isn’t feeling herself."
"Then who do you feel like?" asks Elphie.
Melena's face contorts. "I feel like a muskrat giving birth to a baby hippo. You girls better go." Full- body pain wrings her for a moment. When she can catch her breath: "We'll have a baby brother or sister for you soon. Elphie,
no more stealing."
"If I didn't steal anything yet, I can't do any more of it and I can't do any less."
"Mercy, the mouth on you. Go to law school, if they'll have a girl like you. If they even take girls. Good-bye, my darlings."
This is the only good-bye, casual, flung down like a damp kerchief. Good-bye.
They leave as Frex is arriving home in his punt. Ti'imit tells Frex he isn't welcome in the tent now because the hour has arrived. Frex doesn't hold with that peasant prohibition. He goes in to greet his wife and pray for her. Later, they largely agree this was the big mistake. Men visiting their wives in childbirth is not done.
From the book ELPHIE by Gregory Maguire. Copyright © © 2024 by Kiamo Ko LLC. To be published on March 25, 2025, by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission. 
