book review

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

7th January 2015 By Julianne Leave a Comment

My own silver shoes.

You know how this one goes. A young girl named Dorothy and her little dog, Toto, are carried by a cyclone to the strange land of Oz, where she makes friends with a Scarecrow, a Tin Woodman, and a cowardly Lion, and goes on a quest to find her way home.

I went to see the musical Wicked last year and I decided to read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz beforehand to remind myself what happened in the story as I knew it. It’s a children’s book, so I knew it would be a short read, and although I’d read various picture-book versions of the story, and had seen the film, I’d never read the original story before, and I was curious. Lots of other people seem to have read the entire Oz series in their childhoods and loved it, so I downloaded the first book onto my Nook and started reading it.

It’s odd. I couldn’t tell if it was meant to be satirical – for most of the book there’s so little humour that it seems like it could all be a joke – the characters are so one-dimensional that it seems silly! It’s a relief each of the few times the author makes a joke about this – the best are at the end, when Glinda lets loose with the puns.

It is very similar to the film adaptation and all the picture book versions I’d read. There’s a few extra details, but the biggest change is that the ruby slippers are silver shoes!

Because I knew the plot and I didn’t find the writing endearing, I stopped reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz after a couple of days. I only resumed reading it a couple of days ago, when I’d finished reading another book while on the train.

I’m glad I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but it’s far from a favourite, and I wouldn’t say there’s much in it that will interest adults, though I think it will stay a children’s classic, being a fairytale with a few twists. Apparently, the style of the other books is quite different so I will keep an open mind and try reading the first of the many sequels, The Marvelous Land of Oz.

As these books are in the public domain, you can download them from the links below for free:
Download L. Frank Baum’s books from Project Gutenberg
Download audio versions of L. Frank Baum’s books from LibriVox

I also wanted to pick out a print edition of this book to link to here, and was amazed by the cool stuff available. I’ve put a few of the most interesting below (affiliate links). The ‘Classics Reimagined’ edition looks like a work of modern art, whereas the Osborne Illustrated Originals version would have been my pick as a child! But if I was going to have any version of this book it would be the Annotated version, because I am a complete nerd and I think it would be really interesting! I’ll have to check the libraries.

Have you read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and/or any of the other Oz books? What did you think?

Book Review: Adaptation, by Malinda Lo

11th September 2014 By Julianne Leave a Comment

Reese remembers the birds. She remembers when they attacked. She remembers the plane crashes. She remembers right up until the accident, and then nothing after. A month has passed when she wakes up in a government facility. She knows that something has changed her. Something has changed the world. She has survived when she should have died, and so has her debate partner, David. And no-one has any answers to give her – or do they?

I enjoyed Adaptation a lot, possibly even more than Ash, despite my eternal love of fairy tales. They are very different books, but they both have a powerfully atmospheric quality to them. Adaptation is particularly interesting because it combines this atmosphere with a science-fiction story that has a massive mystery at its heart.

The world of Adaptation is verging on apocalyptic. After the birds, the public doesn’t know what is going on. They are scared. They make up strange theories. Some of them try to investigate. Others trust the authorities, desperately hoping for protection. Reese doesn’t know whether to cling to everything that she knows as normal, or to plunge headlong into this strange new chaos.

Of course, having read ‘The Birds’ by Daphne du Maurier, and watched Hitchcock’s The Birds, I could not help but be reminded of them when reading Adaptation, which made it even creepier for me.

I loved the love triangle in Adaptation, despite not usually being a fan of them. Typically, they persist because the main character is trying to decide which love interest s/he is more attracted to or which would be the better choice, but in Adaptation the romantic options represent something more. They indicate two different sides of Reese; two different paths she could take. But at the same time, they are not just symbols, they are interesting characters in their own right who are just as entangled in the plot and the mysteries of the story as she is. I thought I knew which of the two I preferred, part way through the book, but by the end I was fascinated by both of them and I am looking forward to learning more in the sequel, Inheritance.

I also liked all the other characters, from the mysterious figures at the government facility to Reese’s mother, who stands up for her daughter and Gets Things Done.

I think that this might be a bit of a Marmite book because of the pacing. From the synopsis you might expect a thriller, and this does have some exciting scenes where I was reading on the edge of my seat/bed, desperate to find out what was going to happen. However, it was also quite a slow burner. I liked this, because it built up the atmosphere and it kept me guessing, but other readers might not.

I am looking forward to reading the sequels – the novella, Natural Selection and the full-length novel, Inheritance. Many thanks to Hodder Children’s Books for allowing me to read the ebook of Adaptation via NetGalley.

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