I should start this review by saying that I am a huge Oz nerd. One of my favorite books when I was a kid was the Wizard of Oz and I went on to read most of the sequels. I have seen the movie so many times because I was born in the 70s and it was always on TV at least once a year. Plus I’ve seen the Wiz, read Wicked, and probably think about how awesome life would be in Oz. But since I don’t live in tornado-country, it probably isn’t going to happen for me!
Anyway, I probably liked this book so much and found it so entertaining because it is based on a work that I just love anyway. All the humor in this was so funny to me because I am so familiar with the source material.
The heroine of this book is Arabella Grimsbro who lives in our modern times and goes to a mall and somehow magically gets sucked into the land of Oz, to the start of Dorothy’s adventures. Even though she’s a modern teenage girl, the people of Oz see her as sweet young Dorothy Gale and react to her as such. Arabella meets the Scarecrow and is kind of disgusted by his painted on features. Then when she meets the Tin Woodsman, she finds him really attractive and is simultaneously weirded out by her attraction to him. There are many funny moments with her inner thoughts just reacting to the pageantry and weirdness of Oz.
One of the things that is really fun about the book is that Arabella is familiar with Oz, but only really from the movie, so she is always trying to speed forward to the ending where she can go back home. She pretty much clicks her heels together the second the silver shoes (which were turned ruby only for the movie) are put on her feet. But even with all her insight, there are some truly suspenseful moments when I wondered if she’d ever make it back to the mall.
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