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Title: Good, But Undeserving Of Its Status
Review: Actually two and a half stars. America has, unfortunately, produced fewer true "fairy tales" than Europe. And though Americans could enjoy the old stories, simple and universal as they are, we needed new ones with the distinctive qualities of our land. "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", American tall tales, and the comic book creations of the 1950s and 60s are what we have produced to fill the gap. When I first read this book at 7 years old, I was disappointed it was so different from the movie, which I loved then, but as I've grown older I've found the book to be superior, because it depicts Oz as less of a benign candyland. Despite this the book (and its sequels even more so) is seriously flawed. These are flaws of imagination: like the works of Roal Dahl many of the people who read the Oz books see them as unbridedly imaginative. They arent. C.S. Lewis built a cousin-world to Oz with much more imagination and style in his far better Narnia books. Read them instead.
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