Graham Downs reviewed The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
It gave me the warm fuzzies!
4 stars
I went into this knowing practically nothing about the story. I've never seen the movie (ANY movie), had never read the book, and only knew what I'd been able to glean from memes and other pop-culture references.
It was pretty good. I enjoyed the forward too, which made multiple references to how the book differs from the movie, and although I'd not seen the movie, I was familiar enough with things like the red slippers and the "there's no place like home" quote. Neither of which appear in the book.
It's a fine story and I enjoyed it. One thing that I'm sure the author didn't expect to stick with me, but it did because of current sensibilities, is how the singular genderless pronoun ("they" today) used to be "he". Even when explicitly referencing a hypothetical female, the author uses "he" -- It was something along the lines of, "If …
I went into this knowing practically nothing about the story. I've never seen the movie (ANY movie), had never read the book, and only knew what I'd been able to glean from memes and other pop-culture references.
It was pretty good. I enjoyed the forward too, which made multiple references to how the book differs from the movie, and although I'd not seen the movie, I was familiar enough with things like the red slippers and the "there's no place like home" quote. Neither of which appear in the book.
It's a fine story and I enjoyed it. One thing that I'm sure the author didn't expect to stick with me, but it did because of current sensibilities, is how the singular genderless pronoun ("they" today) used to be "he". Even when explicitly referencing a hypothetical female, the author uses "he" -- It was something along the lines of, "If a boy or girl wanted to do xyz, then he would have to...."
Clearly, there used to be nothing strange about using "he" to refer to a singular person of any gender. I find that... interesting, because even I have adopted "they" for that purpose in my everyday speech.
One negative is that the edition I read, which I got from Everand, had some bad editing in it. I don't know if some of those issues were in the original printing, but at least some of them were clearly issues caused by bad OCR. Why can't people just proofread?
But don't let that detract from your enjoyment of the story. Once again, it's really good. It feels like a piece of history, a really nostalgic walk down memory lane, that puts me in mind of many of the children's stories I read as a child. It gave me the warm fuzzies!