The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

I finally, after the insistence of my sister, read the original Wizard of Oz.

It truly is a fantastic story. It reminds me a bit of the old Grimm's Fairy Tales, in that there were some darker aspects to the novel. The Tin Woodman, for instance, is a highly romantic character because of his history. He was working on building a home for his sweetheart, so he could propose marriage, but her mother didn't want the match and went to the Wicked Witch of the East for help. The WW of E enchanted the Tin Woodman's ax so that he slowly chopped off his own body parts until he was completely made of tin. Without his heart, he forgot about his sweetheart.

It seems that they put the Good Witch of the North and the Good Witch of the South into one character, Glinda, in the the movie. After Dorothy melts the WW of W, and the Wizard disappears in his balloon, she is not immediately greeted by Glinda and told the way to go home. First, she must travel through another part of Oz to get to the Southern Good Witch. This is where she learns the secret of her shoes.

I was surprised that, along the way, each of her companions finds a home of his own. I liked that Baum decided to tell his audience what the other characters would do after Dorothy's departure. The movie is structured to support the idea that Dorothy dreamed the whole thing, so it doesn't matter what her fictional friends do after she returns to Kansas. I was also surprised that the character of Boq, from Gregory MacGuire's Wicked, actually has a basis in the original novel. He is a minor, throwaway character as Dorothy leaves the munchkins. But he has a name that was borrowed for MacGuire's character.

I used to think that the movie, Return to Oz, was creepy and not in keeping with the Oz tradition. I was proven wrong by the actual novel. The original movie was not in keeping with that tradition and Return to Oz was a return to the darker, yet uplifting, story of Dorothy and her friends.

This is definitely a novel that I would read at bedtime with a child. It has scary parts, but it doesn't dwell on them, and is both entertaining for adults and easy for younger readers to understand.