Item 16 - Finish 30 11 books - "Oz Reimagined" Edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen

Ooh, it's all edgy and grimdark

I read "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (check that out, you can get it for free) when I was seven and ill. I had to stay home from school and had nothing to do so my mom gave my a beat up old copy she'd picked up for fifty cents at a bookstore. I read it in one sitting and after I was well I plowed through the other fourteen books in the original series. There is something so lovely about those first few books, they are strange and funny and touching. And always sincere. You always got the feeling that Baum truly loved entertaining children; despite his best efforts to try to the end the series a number of times, he'd always relent to the wishes of the children that would barrage him with letters.

There doesn't appear to be a lot of that same sincerity in this volume. Most of the stories skew toward the gritty re-imaginings that have become the norm in recent years. I should mention here that I'm not a purist when it comes to new interpretations of other works, I don't think that they must follow the tone of the original to the letter. I enjoyed Gregory Maguire's "Wicked" enough to read the sequel "Son of a Witch" and will probably get around to the other two books in the series at some point as well. I just think that going straight to the gritty is a bit cliche; if you want to see what I mean go to deviantART and search for "Oz re-imagined" or "Oz reimagined." There are some clever ideas on there, but it's largely the same sort of material that would be right at home in this book.

I don't want to seem like there weren't any good stories in this book, there were a few that I really liked. One of my favorites was "The Boy Detective of Oz" by Tad Williams. It served as a great commentary on the very thing that I'm talking about, the habit of authors to distort Oz into a nightmare without much reason. Williams is actually able to have his cake and eat it too, in this way; he gets to do a little of the dreary stuff within a framework where it works, while still telling a somewhat more classical Oz story and gets in a jab at writers whose first impulse is to turn the Tin Woodman into a murderous mechanical tyrant.

There were a some other stories in here that I really enjoyed, one or two that fall into that category I've so scorned in the last three paragraphs. The thing they had in common was some sort of joy lurking in the text. As I said before, sincerity is essential to Oz.