The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
I don't believe I ever read any of the books in this series before. Sure, we're all familiar with the movie. My niece who probably doesn't remember it, lived for it as a toddler. She actually wore through a couple of VHS tapes of the movie and, with my dad's coaching, did a darn good Cowardly Lion impersonation. After a lifetime of watching this movie so many times and all the memories it's left me with that have nothing to do with the movie itself, the book was sort of a disappointment.
I read this book through the Daily Lit service, which if you haven't used it yet, you should check it out immediately. I get portions of books emailed to me every morning at 9 a.m. So far, I've polished off about a dozen books ranging from children's books like The Wizard of Oz, Little Women and Anne of Green Gables, to classics like Moll Flanders, The Count of Monte Cristo and Madame Bovary. There are enough titles to make it tough to plot out your reading list, but still a lot of fun.
So, we all know the story of Dorothy Gale and how she got swept away from her life with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry in Kansas in a cyclone (which was actually a tornado, and not even remotely a cyclone which is really a tornado made of water and not wind) and dropped onto the body of the Wicked Witch of the East with her house in Oz. There she meets the munchkins and looks for a way to get home. I think that the Dorothy in the book is supposed to be much younger than Judy Garland was in the movie. The slippers are silver and not ruby, but that probably had more to do with the whole Technicolor thing.
Strangely, I think I prefer the movie. The foreword by the author claims that his idea was to make stories for children that weren't scary and disturbing, but there's plenty of disturbing stuff in this story. You've got a lost child who needs to kill a wicked witch to convince a wizard bent on terrifying her to send her home. There are poison flowers and flying attack monkeys, plenty of stuff to scare kids. I plan to read more of the books in the series in an attempt to see if my opinion improves. I have no problem admitting that my history the movie that makes liking the book difficult. We'll see.
