wizard of oz

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum came free with a copy of The Man in the Iron Mask I bought at the bookstore to bring with me to Italy. Come to find out The Man in the Iron Mask is the last in a series of sequels Dumas wrote to follow up The Three Musketeers. It’s actually the third part of a long third book so I have a few thousand pages to read before I get to the Iron Mask.

Oz on the other hand was a pleasant surprise—it’s a completely different story than the cinematic superstar of the same name. The introduction (written by J. T. Barbarese along with end notes) were informative and included some helpful analysis which helped me to understand the differences between the book and the movie, as well the stage production which Baum helped to write. Apparently the stage production included some of the changes from the book which appear in the movie. The consensus being that production of some of Baum’s fanciful ideas may have been either too expensive or simply not possible at the time.

It was fun to read the story that so closely matches the movie we’ve all seen so many times but is different in both subtle and dramatic ways. Oz has been compared to both Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. Both have young heroines and both stories can be summarized as the fanciful dream of the main character. This is exactly the storyline of the movie version of Oz, but that is not how Baum envisioned the adventure of his heroine.

The writing is simple and geared toward his target audience. Baum also consciously avoided the terrors common to children’s literature to that point. Baum was also the first to break the mold of many standard children’s story characters, most importantly was the creation of good witches; a concept which didn’t exist in children's literature befor e Baum.

Read this book. Read it to your children and after a few weeks maybe watch the movie together.