Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked Years, #1)

by Gregory Maguire

Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.

‘And now respectable unionists are going in droves over to the pleasure faith,’ said Frex, snorting, ‘or even tiktokism, which hardly even qualifies as a religion. To the ignorant everything is spectacle these days.

She is trying that rarest of strategies, telling the truth, and making it sound plausible. They sat down.

Galinda didn’t know how long it had been there, or what it had heard, but she had never liked tiktok creatures.

‘When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis,’ she said, ‘those who are the most themselves are the victims.’

‘I’ve heard more than one clever creature draw a connection between the rise of tiktokism and the erosion of traditional Animal labor. We weren’t beasts of burden, but we were good reliable laborers. If we were made redundant in the workforce, it was only a matter of time before we’d be socially redundant too. Anyway, that’s one theory. My own feeling is that there is real evil abroad in the land.