Review: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

I adored this book.  I've owned it for years but never got around to reading it.  And I'm so glad I finally did.  I'm pretty sure you all know the basic story of The Wizard and Dorothy, so I will skip that.  This book, of course, is so different from the movie with Judy Garland.  I think the new Oz movie with James Franco captured a lot of the features of this book though, like the porcelain town, which I was enchanted by in the book.  You really can't compare the book to any Oz movies because they are so very different.

I loved that Dorothy is a little girl in the book, and she is so much more badass, in my opinion.  Not like a bad girl, but super determined to get to the Emerald City and get home.  The fact that she was just a little girl made me love the story more than I would have had Dorothy been older.

My favorite part of the book were the illustrations.  I loved them!  Each chapter has one or two, and I think children reading this book would get a kick out of them.  I think this book was so well loved when it first came out because children who were living "grey" lives like Dorothy on farms, in cities, where ever, loved that Dorothy was able to get picked up by a tornado and land in a completely different world full of talking animals and vibrant colors. 

This is my favorite line from the book:
Page 13: When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side.  Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions.  The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it.  Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere.  Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.

Have you read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?

Title:The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Author: L. Frank Baum
Date of Publication: 1900 originally, my copy is from 2005
Number of Pages: 213
Genre: Fiction
Source: Personal Copy