The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

genre: children's literature



I read this one aloud to my seven year old son.  His review (with some sentence starters from mom :): 

It's about this girl with a dog and they went into a cyclone and the house carried it over to this weird place. She killed the witch of the East and the munchkins and their queen gave her a kiss and the girl wore the shoes of the witch of the East.  Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas so she wants to go to Oz the Great and Terrible and when she is trying to get in the balloon, she wasn't able to get in.  It's cool because I like hot air balloons and I like cyclones.  It's very funny when all the china people just broke when they got stepped on.  

The people that she meets along the way are the scarecrow, the lion, the tin woodman.  It was a really exciting book because when they went up into the cyclone I was really wondering what was going to happen.  The really scary part is when those big beasts come. I think the idea of this book is to never give up because when the girl named Dorothy, when she was trying to get to Oz, she never stopped trying. 

And there you have it.  I, personally, wasn't thrilled.  It's all fine and I like the illustrations by Lisbeth Zwerger in my copy, but the story is rather blandly told, in my opinion.  I like the irony of searching for something you already have.  The idea of Oz being really a human from the midwest is rather clever - and I like it for old time's sake (which does matter) plus, Preston really did enjoy the whole thing.

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