No.97 - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

I opened the pages of my little gold edged copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with hazy memories of the musical whirling around my head. Judy Garland skipping arm in arm with the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion down the yellow brick road, rainbow coloured horses and of course the ruby slippers. And I've been humming 'If I only had a brain' for weeks now!

I'll admit to not really looking forward to reading this book. There were bound to be books on the list that I just wasn't going to get on with and I was convinced that this would be one of those. Written in 1900, I was expecting the language to be dense and dry, full of moral teaching and sensible advice for children, like other books of this period. However, I was pleasantly surprised! It's actually beautifully written and Baum doesn't lecture his readers at all. The plot moves at a good pace, with Dorothy being blown away on the first few pages, which was much quicker than I had expected! I was expecting pages of waffle about her life in Kansas, but I was pleased to get straight into the adventure.

Like most fairy stories, the original has its fair share of gruesomeness and I'm pleased to report that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is no exception! The Tin Woodman gives a lovely account of how he became a tin man by chopping off all his own limbs!! Given an enchanted axe by the Wicked
Witch of the East he then proceeds to accidentally cut off his arms, legs, head! Then to add insult to injury he manages to cut his own torso in half too! But luckily he gets each part sorted out by a tin smith and all is good! He is also not adverse to using his axe skills to save Dorothy and the others, chopping the heads off most of the enemies they come across! Another macabre touch are the pins that Oz puts in the Scarecrow's brain, which are supposed to show his sharp mind, but just protrude out of his scalp in a rather grim way when we he thinks too much! See the illustration below....

There are certainly a few things that are very different to the film. For example, there are no rainbow horses... they are all green. Also Dorothy's adventure was not a dream at all, but a real occurance! She arrives home find a new house has been built and that her aunt and uncle presume she has died! But far more shocking than that is that there are no famous ruby slippers in L. Frank Baum's book!! The shoes that Dorothy uses to get home to Kansas are in fact silver! They were changed to red in the film to show up in Technicolour! I guess silver slippers just weren't glamorous enough for Hollywood.

Thanks for reading X

Next up is Michael Foreman's War Boy, which I can't wait to write about! It was brilliant!