The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I remember reading this book many years ago, and enjoying the film a lot, so I decided to read it again, on Kindle.
Unfortunatley, I managed to purchase a quite bad Kindle edition, which was almost illegible - it looked as though it had been translated into another language, and then someone with a bad knowledge of the language had attempted to translate it back into English. It was full of grammatical errors and word misuse/misinterpretation. So, at one point Dorothy "turned into fed", and I laughed out loud at the moment when the scarcrow "felt so homosexual".
Reading difficulties aside, I enjoyed the book, and had forgotten about many of the differences between this and the film, for example a sequence at the end when the characters trek to visit the Good Witch of the South, and episodes involving the Queen of the Fieldmice and creatures called Kalidahs. The flying monkeys also get a bigger role in the book because Dorothy is able to grant three requests from them after defeating the Wicked Witch of the West.
Reading it as an adult, the storytelling feels a little simplistic, but it was good to visit this again, and I also downloaded the second book, "The Marvelous Land of Oz", but tried a sample first to make sure it wasn't full of errors.
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