book review: The Flying Girl by Edith Van Dyne

[ozma914]

This one is a bit odd for me, considering The Flying Girl was published all the way back in 1911. Still, it came highly recommended, and I found it easier to read than a lot of other writing at the time was.

It's also far more feminist than you'd imagine, at least for its time. The Flying Girl tells the story of Orissa Kane, a 17-year-old in

Comments

[elizalavelle]

This looks interesting!

Baum was ahead of his time for sure. The later Oz books by Ruth Plumly Thompson actually got more regressive in comparison to his earlier work.

[ozma914]

It may be because I didn't discover them until I was an adult, but I never really warmed up to Thompson's books. That's part of the reason why my Oz book uses only Baum's 14 as background.

[elizalavelle]

I had one of her books as a child and even then I liked it okay but it wasn't great. Thankfully it wasn't one of the really really racist ones. She has a couple that I was pretty appalled by given she was writing after Baum and he hadn't had that vibe in his books at all.

[ozma914]

Just another case of a new writer putting their own stamp on the franchise--whether we want them to or not. My Oz book features a black female character who's an FBI agent--I wonder what she would have thought of that? Actually, that would have been inconceivable to most people of her time.