| $@%&! level: None “Bedroom” level: None Violence level: Low (except for a beating with a dinner pail, and several people being turned into eggs) Back Cover: “In another unforgettable adventure about Dorothy from Kansas and her friends from Oz—the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion—Dorothy finds herself in the fairy realm of Ev. With the help of a talking chicken, a mechanical man, a tiger whose appetite is never satisfied, and a princess with thirty heads, Dorothy sets out to rescue the Queen of Ev and her ten children. They have all been imprisoned by the cruel Nome King, and even Ozma, the wise Ruler of Oz, is no match for him. Can Dorothy and her friends set the royal family free, or will the Nome King's enchantments prove too much even for a brave girl from Kansas?” |
It surprised me how much I remembered about this story, after not having read it for a couple of decades. I didn't recall the iron giant, but everything else was pretty clear in my memory. I suppose even as a child I loved inventive ideas and unexpected solutions, so I remembered these ones. I think I learned some good lessons from this book when I was young. One of them is that you can't judge by appearances. Even if someone looks like Santa Claus, that doesn't mean he's necessarily trustworthy, and a beautiful person may be deeply selfish. (By the way, the princess may have thirty heads, but she only wears one at a time. Just to clarify the back cover, so you're not imagining a hydra-like woman. And all of her heads are beautiful, one way or another.) Another lesson is the lesson of the Wheelers. In some ways they're a bit like the Cowardly Lion, in that they act fierce to keep people from attacking them. The difference is that the Wheelers are completely harmless, unable to hurt anyone even if they tried. (Except even as a child I figured out that they could bite if they really wanted to.) At first, Dorothy is afraid of them just because they've told her she ought to be, but when she comes to think about it, she realizes that she doesn't need to fear them at all. That's an important thing to hear, especially for a shy kid. After all, what are the people in a crowded room going to do to you--really?