The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

L. Frank Baum

Kindle Book

In a terrifying instant of darkness, a tornado snatches up Dorothy Gale and her dog Toto, whirling them on the wild wind out of Kansas and straight to Oz. 
In this wondrous world of sorcery and danger, Munchkins, flying monkeys, talking mice and fighting trees, all Dorothy wants to do is go home...

Together with the Scarecrow who wants a brain, the Tin Man who wants a heart, and the Cowardly Lion who wants courage, Dorothy and Toto must follow the Yellow Brick Road to find the Wizard of the Emerald City. But before the wizard of Oz will grant their wishes, Dorothy and her friends must do the impossible--Destroy the all-powerful Wicked Witch of the West... 

Everyone knows the story of the wizard of Oz – Kanas and the tornado, Dorothy & Toto wanting to go home, Scarecrow looking for a brain, Tin Man wanting a heart and a cowardly lion needing courage plus a couple of wicked witches, flying monkeys and the wonderful wizard himself. It’s been made famous by several films – the most famous being the Judy Garland one, had a hit musical Wicked and a glorious 3D adventure earlier this year with Oz The Great and Powerful, but with all this going on I realised I hadn’t read the original story itself. Oh, I thought I knew it but in my ongoing attempt to squeeze some classics into my reading schedule , this seemed like a nice ‘light’ classic for kids that I could pick up on holiday. While it is certainly an easy read aimed at children I found myself completely enthralled in Dorothy and her companion’s adventures while delighting in this world that the films I’ve seen have barely touched upon.

 I really enjoyed Dorothy’s friends exploits on their adventures that aren’t frequently covered on screen or stage with the Scarecrow thinking their way out of various problems while still lamenting his lack of a brain, the Tin Man saving various creatures while wishing he could feel more while the lion protects the group from various dangers while still feeling scared. All are smarter, more caring and braver than the film has ever portrayed them and really made me warm to them. I loved some of their escapades that aren’t well known including being chased by Kalidah – huge monsters crossed between a tiger and a bear and the background to the flying monkeys. The world is much more complicated than it first appeared and I felt like it was a real metaphor for life. Dorothy didn’t develop too much character apart from being a ‘good girl’ – and at one point she wanted to steal a china princess to take home with home her! Still she is more like our guide than a real person and it never bothered me too much.

This is a fun read which doesn’t disappoint if you love the films and world from other media. It is still surprising and fun with lots of pleasant twists on characters you think you already know. L. Frank Baum wrote a wide selection of other stories about Oz and I certainly plan to pick up a couple more and explore this wonderful world in more detail. 

Recommended for fans of Rudyard Kipling and Gregory Maguire. 8 out of 10

A Choose Your Own Adventure Review: Beyond Escape!

Choose Your Own Adventure #15: Beyond Escape!

By R. A. Montgomery

Publisher: Chooseco

The new nation of Turtalia is caught in a death struggle with the evil Doradan state.  Warfare has spread to San Francisco, where a determined band of guerrillas is holding out in the hills watching the destruction of this once-beautiful city.  With the stakes high--for freedom, democracy and the rule of law and not men--the struggle against the police state of Dorado is fierce.  But the spectre of none of these freedoms is worse.  Don't give up!

I remember borrowing a lot of these Choose Your Own Adventure stories from the local library when I was younger. I loved the excitement and feeling of power from deciding how the story would progress – after all we’ve all had those moments when you just want to reach into your current book and either give the characters a big hug, shake some sense into them or kick the bad guys on the shins. I received this particular book recently as a gift from a friend who had visited the Strand Bookshop in New York (I plan to make a pilgrimage there myself at some point!) and I was excited to dive into some nostalgia and ‘choose my own adventure’!

In this story, the US has been split into two new countries: Turtalia, a democratic country and Dorada, an evil dictatorship. You work for the country of Turtalia and immediately have to decide whether to look for your missing spies deep in Doradan or go after an escaped spy who has stolen top level files from your base. After that the adventure splits and you keep making decisions going to different pages depending on what you decide. My first read through I ended up being blown out of the air in a helicopter by an alien spaceship. Not exactly what I was expecting. My second time I ended having my mind wiped and having the brain capacity of a three year old! A few further choices and I ended up rescuing my lost spies along with critical information about Doradan’s invasion plans, trapped with rebels deep in Dorada, lost in the wilderness, captured by Doradan forces and offering an alien civilisation refuge on Earth in return for their help beating Dorada.

I have to admit that after a while flipping between all these pages was a little wearing – especially as characterisation was limited. ‘You’ even end speaking to yourself a lot in the story to remind the reading what you have chosen. Sometimes the different directions you end up in are so bizarre – your choice seems to be what makes aliens good or bad, whether Dorada invades or not. Other people aren’t consistent with their actions and characters – one guy will be a rebel if you decide one thing and the same guy will be a spy if you decide something else while in ‘real’ life he would be one thing or the other no matter if you decide to sit at the table or leave. Overall, this was a fun little diversion but there is a reason this time of story doesn’t work for adult readers.

Recommended for young readers. 7 out of 10

War Horse Review

War Horse

-       Michael Morpurgo

Publisher: Egmont Press

Joey is a warhorse, but he wasn't always. Once, he was a farm horse and a gentle boy named Albert was his master. Then World War I came storming through and everything changed. Albert's father sells Joey to the army where the beautiful, red-bay horse is trained to charge the enemy, drag heavy artillery, and carry wounded soldiers not much older than Albert off of battlefields. Amongst the clamoring of guns and slogging through the cold mud, Joey wonders if the war will ever end. And if it does, will he ever find Albert again?

When so many teen and children’s books are now aiming towards high word and page count, it’s refreshing to pick up a book that is less than 200 pages. Even more surprising is just how moving and emotional War Horse considering it’s slim size. I’ve previously seen the War Horse stage show and film so I had a good idea of what to expect but I still ended up in tears on several occasions during the couple of hours or so it took to read this book.

Joey starts on the farm, growing up with Albert before ending up sold to the cavalry at the start of the first world war and follows his trials and tribulations throughout the war. Joey is a remarkably strong horse who does whatever he is told to – through charging barbed wire on the front to pulling the massive machine guns through mud. He is never asked what he wants or given much thanks – much like many of the human soldiers on both sides during the war. I don’t want to give too much away, but Michael Morpurgo manages to create vivid characters – both human and horse with minimal words, allowing their actions to speak for their themselves.

By the end of the novel, I felt like a complete emotional wreck and was utterly grateful to all the animals we have working for us, not just a hundred years ago, but those we continue to use today. They deserve so much.

Recommended for fans of Dick King-Smith and John Boyne. 10 out of 10.

Guest Review: A Little Magic

I'm afraid I have so many books waiting to be read on my shelves at the moment that I can't possibly read them all, so I don't accept many review copies. But I had the idea that my regular guest reviewer, Sarah who has a much smaller TBR pile than myself, might like to try some of the books I get offered. So I sent her a selection of requests and this was one she picked to read!

A Little Magic

- Valerie Gillen

When the grandmother she never met is stricken by a mysterious coma, Siobhan Kelly finds herself uprooted from her familiar California life and Irish step dancing classes, and dealing with Spring in Vermont, where the roads are muddy, it’s as likely to snow as it is to rain, and the kids there think that since she’s from Encino, she must be a “valley girl” (fer shurr). Out of sheer loneliness, she falls in with a small group of friends including shy hottie David, his academically advanced little sister Fiona, and their cousin Alicia, who claims to be a witch. It doesn’t take Fiona’s telling her that Alicia’s dark magic landed another girl at school in a wheelchair, for Siobhan to know Alicia is not the kind of person she wants to hang around with.

As you can imagine, Mel gets a lot of book review requests and she has finally decided to farm some of them out to me (could this have anything to do with all the Baileys drinking she was planning to do over Christmas I wonder???! [No Comment - Mel]).  I have just finished the first of these, the YA book A Little Magic, which stars a young, Irish-dancing proto-witch called Siobhan. Siobhan and her family are made to move from their home in California to Vermont, where the grandmother she has never met has slipped into a mysterious coma.  Staying in the grandmother’s strange house, with an ever-blooming garden, kick-starts Siobhan’s growth from totally uninformed teen to powerful (but with still much to learn) young witch.

A Little Magic is a very sweet book, but it definitely puts the ‘Y’ into YA.  I can imagine the 10-12 year old girls loving this, with its cute mix of talking cats, Irish-dancing, sparkly lights, family bonds and young love; but anyone who has read the more adult YA books will find it all a bit simplistic.  Good and bad are easily enough spotted, moments of peril are only superficial, and everyone says exactly what they mean.

Definitely one for pre-teens looking to enjoy their first taste of the fantasy genre – 8/10 for them, 5/10 for us.

Books Remembered #5: Strange Orbit by Margaret Simpson

This is a semi-regular feature where I reminisce about books or even series that I read over and over again. Or even a book read once that changed the way I looked at life. It can be a book from childhood or a modern series I just can’t get enough off. It’s not a review of the book(s) but merely remembering the impact it had on me and how it’s shaped my reading habits and likes –what made that book(s) memorable.

When I was a teenager I read a lot of teen books. Back in the early 90s in Britain this mostly meant Point Horror books – a print house that specialised in horror stories for teenagers based on premises like The Babysitter – where the call was coming from inside the house (not a scary story that would work so well these days with mobile phones!) - to more supernatural causes such as moving to a new a house to find a vampire living there. I may come back to these stories in the future but what I’m getting at is that Point Horror was extremely successful. So much so, that the print range soon expanded and you could find Point Fantasy and Point Sci-Fi books. And the book I want to remember today is one of the Point Sci-Fi books. It’s no exaggeration to say this book really did change my life.

The book is Strange Orbit by Margaret Simpson (a name which these days conjures an image of a grown Maggie Simpson but meant little to me back then!). The book involved a privately funded trip by a wealthy woman who wanted to take children into space. The heroine was one the children who was picked to go (after having to apply and go through a variety of intelligence and physical tests). I think there were four of them in the end plus the pilot and woman funding the trip. The idea of teens going into space was fascinating to me and what happened when they got there blew me away. Something went wrong when they were orbit and they ended up travelling around the solar system trying to find a way home. This involved them meeting Schrödinger’s Camel (not a cat as is popularly thought), travelling into the future to a dying earth when most humans have left and visiting Mars (or it may have been Jupiter). There was so much imagination and possibility in this small book that I was enthralled – I wanted to go into space! I wanted to meet a talking camel on the moon!

While I can’t say that I’ve ever done either of those things, I did the next best thing I could – I started studying the solar system – the planets, the moon, the sun and the stars. After all we all know they’re there but how much do you really know about them? This soon developed into me wanting to know as much as I could about all things astronomical. This was a phase I never really grew out off and when I was 18 I went off to study Astrophysics at Cardiff university. I finished four years later was a Masters degree – all this because I read Strange Orbit when I was a teenager.

And do you know what? At least three other people I met on the same course also knew about Schrödinger’s Camel!

If you liked this feature, check out previous entries:
Books Remembered #1: Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles

Books Remembered #2: The Magic Faraway Tree

Books Remembered #3: Christopher Pike's Sati

Books Remembered #4: Scott O'Dell's The Island of Blue Dolphins

Books Remembered #4: Scott O'Dell's The Island of Blue Dolphins

This is a feature where I reminisce about books or even series that I read over and over again. Or even a book read once that changed the way I looked at life. It can be a book from childhood or a modern series I just can’t get enough off. It’s not a review of the book(s) but merely remembering the impact it had on me and how it’s shaped my reading habits and likes –what made that book(s) memorable. Feel free to join in with your own books remembered.

I never owned a copy of The Island of Blue Dolphins but Scott O’Dell, but it was probably the book I checked out of my local library the most. The basic premise is based on a true story of a whole tribe who were relocated off their island in the late 19th century/early 20th century. As they are sailing off the dead chief’s daughter sees that her younger brother has been left behind on the island and the ship wouldn’t turn round her him, so she jumps of the ship and swims to shore to look after him. She is only in her early teens at this time. However, shortly after this her brother dies and she is left alone. The Ship never returns for her.

However through various adventures as she learns to live on island. This was the original independent tough heroine for me. She learns how to fish, forage and fend for herself on an island deserted of human contact for years. At one point she builds a raft and attempts to leave island but as the island is based in the pacific she just ends back at the island.

Throughout the whole book the heroine doesn’t spend much time crying or bemoaning her lot; she gets on with it. She knows that the only thing or person that will change her circumstances is herself and she makes those changes. Most of books I read now have a kick-ass heroine who saves the day and this is where my fascination for this type of character comes from. While short, the books covers years as she grows into a young woman. Her only company are the local wild dogs – who are more foe than friend. For some reason this story as always stayed with me. The idea of this girl growing up alone spoke to me – I guess we all feel alone growing up but she truly was. More than that, she survived and even thrived under those circumstances.

I understand it’s the 50 year anniversary this year since The Island of Blue Dolphins was original released...I think I’ll get my hands on a copy – just to keep her company one more time.

If you liked this feature, check out previous entries:
Books Remembered #1: Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles
Books Remembered #2: The Magic Faraway Tree
Books Remembered #3: Christopher Pike's Sati

Books Remembered #2: The Magic Faraway Tree

This is a new feature that reminiscing about books or even series that I read over and over again. Or even a book read once that changed the way I looked at life. It can be a book from childhood or a modern series I just can’t get enough off. It’s not a review of the book(s) but merely remembering the impact it had on me and how it’s shaped my reading habits and likes –what made that book(s) memorable. Feel free to join in with your own books remembered.

This week on Books Remembered I want to talk (or write as the case is!) about one the first fantasy books I ever read – the Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. These days Blyton has fallen out of favour for her old fashioned views and outdated treatment of women among other things. In fact, that was all pretty much true when I read these books about 22 years ago. But being seven/eight years old, I never really noticed those things. What fascinated me was this massive tree in the forest where all these strange people lived – all sorts of different people including Moon-face and Silkie the fairy and Wassisname – who no-one could remember his real name. There was the guy who was always snoring and Saucepan Man who wore saucepans. Every day a different land would come to rest at the top the tree, so when the three children who lived near the woods climbed to the top they found themselves having all sorts of fun adventures – from the Rocking land, to the land made of sweets to the school land run by a very strict headmistress. Each day would bring something different – literally a land of possibilities and they never knew what would happen. To a young child starting to use her imagination this was beautiful story telling – fantasy indeed. Even leaving the tree once you got to the top involved a slide down to the bottom again!

There were three books about the Magic Faraway Tree and their adventures and I loved them all. I would get them out from my local library as often as I could and re-read them over and over. It was a literal escape where any world you could think off could happen – at the same time the children learnt about themselves and were punished for being naughty. While it was a very black and white world – it helped shaped my imagination and has certainly impacted my reading habits since. I haven’t read these books in a long time and I don’t really want to – the idea of picking through these books with older, more cynical eyes would somehow ruin the fond memories I have of them. I prefer to remember The Magic Faraway Tree as the first books to show me that books were about more than words – they could contain whole worlds – as sometimes more than one.