AR: 5.4

A classic children's tale that has just the right balance of sweet and thrilling and scary, with an emphasis on the virtues of determination, courage, love, cooperation, and friendship, but without any tiresome moralizing.

Hardcover that I picked up at a church rummage sale for the funky illustrations. This is the first time I've read the text version, and I liked it better than the audio read by Anne Hathaway.

I read this book for the Booklikes Halloween Bingo 2019, for the square Spellbound: Witches, warlocks, sorcerers and witchcraft.
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Why have I never read this book before?! Okay, I'll tell you why I've never read this book before - I HATE the movie. There, I said it. Get the lashings over with now, because I doubt I'll be changing my mind any time soon. The music! The stupid man in a lion costume! The wrong-coloured shoes! No no no.

So, as you might imagine, it was a very pleasant surprise when I found myself, twenty pages into the book, sitting with a gentle smile on my face thinking, "Yeah, just one more chapter before I go do something useful." This is actually a really lovely little book! It is charming and whimsical and full of polite conversation and intriguing creatures, just as a children's classic should be. As Dorothy and her friends wend their merry way towards self-knowledge and magical wish fulfillment, they meet with all kinds of nice people, bizarre monsters and tricky situations, but you know that everything's going to be okay in the end because Baum said so.

That said, it's not all sunshine and roses in the Land of Oz, oh no... What Baum omits by way of serious peril for his leading characters, he makes up for with the macabre ends he concocts for the naughty beasts that threaten them. Yes, the Wicked Witch of the West is destroyed with a humble bucket of water (if that's a spoiler... well, if you don't know it now you never will) - but everything else is thrown off a cliff, has its neck broken, is beheaded or chopped in half by the Tin Man's axe. All the kinds of deaths that make me shudder and put down my lunch for a moment. But then everybody skips on and is very jolly to have survived another menace, so that's okay.

Needless to say, the book was a wonderful little read, despite the fact that I had "We're off to see the wizard" stuck in my head THE WHOLE TIME. Baum's imaginary world was a delight to explore, twisting old fairytale cliches into something new and unique (like the mischievous Winged Monkeys and their three wishes taking the place of the traditional genie, for example), and Dorothy's well-mannered sweetness was like a soothing balm for my summer-holiday-brat-frazzled nerves. My edition is a smart little 'Great Reads' hardback, with cute cartoony line drawings that don't look AT ALL like the movie characters (much to their credit), which I found really rounded off the reading experience. Roll on book 2 - I think I'm hooked! ( )