Book-a-day until I publish July 15.
I love the Oz books. Love, love, love them. I was devoted to them as a child. Collected several different sets, some time before that became fashionable. My favorites were the white ones with the gorgeous art nouveau drawings and the great index in the back with a catalogue of all the different original L. Frank Baum volumes.
The Oz books are wonderful and weird and wacky and so very different from the movie. Or should I say movies? No, let’s start with movie. The 1939 classic.
Greatest year of moviemaking, many say. The Wizard of Oz. Gone with the Wind, Dark Victory. Wuthering Heights. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Of Mice and Men. So very many other great movies.
And the Wizard of Oz movie is also wonderful and weird and wacky. Just in a different way from the books.
Oz has been adapted so many ways. The sequel books after Baum died, from many different authors. The movies. There have been quite a few.
Gregory Maguire’s wonderful Wicked, which tells the original Oz story from a very different point of view—that of the Wicked Witch of the West. Or was she wicked? Maguire wrote a whole series of his alternate history of Oz.
And then Oz was visited again, the same story being told in yet another way. Wicked became a Broadway musical. Not even the first Oz musical. That would be The Wiz. And Wicked the musical is also wonderful and weird and wacky in its very own way, which is different from the Maguire book, which is different from the Baum books.
The Baum books are now public domain, and all sorts of new books are being written that put their own spin on the Oz story. I’ve read a few. Liked some a lot, some less than others.
Oz is one of those magic lands that just seems so real. It seems so real that we should be able to reach through the page and find ourselves there.
In my book, The Lost Princess of Story, Lilla loves books more than just about anything in her life. She is convinced she can hear her books calling, that the worlds of magic in the books are real and she can get there somehow.
Lilla does not know it, but she is right.
Oz still holds great magic, all these years later.
When was the last time you read one of the original books? You might be surprised what you find in the pages.
Give some of the newer retelling a try as well. I am very fond of the Maguire, both the books and the musical.
Your Fairy Bookmother,
Suzanne
