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A review by princess_starr
Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond by John Joseph Adams, Douglas Cohen
4.0
I’ve always only just liked the Wizard of Oz and its various incarnations, updates, reimaginings and what have you, but I’ve never really loved it. The only Oz-related thing that ever captured my imagination was Ozma of Oz, which I read and reread all throughout the last two years of elementary school.* (And I first picked up because I had seen Return to Oz on a double feature with Labyrinth. Yeah…) I think the 1939 movie’s fine, I’m not enamored with it, I read the first book once upon a time, but I can’t remember more specific details, and I do really like both versions of Wicked, but I’m not crazy about it.
And it’s a shame, because I do think that more people should go and read the original books, because it’s hard to get a children’s series that’s not been ripped apart by criticism and allegory. (Not that Oz hasn’t been subject to criticism—c’mon, Baum was a massive feminist and it shows—but compared to Alice in Wonderland or the Chronicles of Narnia, it feels like he gets off easy. Or at least in my experience, that’s what it’s felt like.) And I think that most of it has to do that the movie is so beloved, that any attempt to go further into the World of Oz is automatically biased against it. Even the musical adaptation of Wicked, which is arguably the most successful of the Ozian derivatives, is still in a specific subculture that’s not 100% mainstream. And I do get disappointed with it, because I do think that there’s such a rich universe here that doesn’t get explored due to this ingrained pop culture subconscious.
Which is why I really like this anthology, because there is an acknowledgment that the authors are working against this holy text of 20th century films (and not just the fact that they have to remind you that Dorothy originally had silver slippers, not ruby). And yet, this adds so much more to the world of Oz and actually explores it, instead of just riffing on the same familiar story.
I would say about half of the stories in here are riffs and retellings of the original story, but what makes it work for is that all of the authors in the anthology have such wildly different takes and ideas of how to change things up that it kept my interest and I wasn’t rolling my eyes when I read three retellings/riffs in a row. For example, there’s “The Veiled Shanghai” by Ken Liu, which is one for one, but reimagines the setting in China during the May Fourth Movement in 1919. This is immediately followed by Robin Swirsky’s “Beyond the Naked Eye,” which throws in a Hunger Games-esque competition in place of the original story, only to serve as the background events as an assassination plot unfolds. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have Robin Wasserman’s “One Flew Over the Rainbow” which is the bleak, gritty realistic “reimagining” by recasting the characters in a psych ward (no, it doesn’t have a twist, thank God), and manages one of a gut-punch. And then there’s “A Tornado of Dorothys,” which feels like a bigger metaphor for the collection itself, as we see a Dorothy land in Oz and confront the Dorothys that came before her and that the story doesn’t really end.
This is not to imply that every story in this collection is just reimaginings of Dorothy’s journey—the other half of the stories involved here are original tales set in the same world, sometimes using familiar charactes, others featuring nothing but original characters and nods to what’s come before. “The Great Zeppelin Heist of Oz” is an immensely fun prequel story that manages to play around with the character histories from what we know, “ and “The Cobbler of Oz” is a sweet fairy tale that is the perfect capper to the collection.
The only thing that I wasn’t as fond of were the number of stories that were darker—not to say that they were bad, but that’s when I felt things were getting a little too repetive in tone. Mainly the “darker side of the Emerald City” dystopic ones, which is a fair exploration, but again, those felt a little more like retreads than being interesting. I did like “Emeralds to Emeralds, Dust to Dust,” but when I got to “A Meeting in Oz,” I was getting bored with the ‘GRIMDARK in your beloved children’s story!” (See also “Dead Blue,” which is dark cyberpunk retelling that just didn’t quite work for me.)
I do really think that this is a strong collection overall—there’s stories in here that I didn’t like, but only one or two that I actively disliked, and even the ones I was lukewarm on, I did like the concept or the writing. And as I said, what works in its favor is that although there are similar stories or ideas, the writing and concepts vary wildly from story, and that’s what kept me interest throughout. I would definitely recommend checking this one out, even if all you know about Oz is the movie or Wicked.
*There were two Frank L. Baum books that I read so many times as a kid—Ozma of Oz being one, and the other was The Life and Times of Santa Claus. Which if you haven’t read, I still think it’s worth checking out. I might have to hunt down a copy and give it a reread, but I remember it being delightful.
And it’s a shame, because I do think that more people should go and read the original books, because it’s hard to get a children’s series that’s not been ripped apart by criticism and allegory. (Not that Oz hasn’t been subject to criticism—c’mon, Baum was a massive feminist and it shows—but compared to Alice in Wonderland or the Chronicles of Narnia, it feels like he gets off easy. Or at least in my experience, that’s what it’s felt like.) And I think that most of it has to do that the movie is so beloved, that any attempt to go further into the World of Oz is automatically biased against it. Even the musical adaptation of Wicked, which is arguably the most successful of the Ozian derivatives, is still in a specific subculture that’s not 100% mainstream. And I do get disappointed with it, because I do think that there’s such a rich universe here that doesn’t get explored due to this ingrained pop culture subconscious.
Which is why I really like this anthology, because there is an acknowledgment that the authors are working against this holy text of 20th century films (and not just the fact that they have to remind you that Dorothy originally had silver slippers, not ruby). And yet, this adds so much more to the world of Oz and actually explores it, instead of just riffing on the same familiar story.
I would say about half of the stories in here are riffs and retellings of the original story, but what makes it work for is that all of the authors in the anthology have such wildly different takes and ideas of how to change things up that it kept my interest and I wasn’t rolling my eyes when I read three retellings/riffs in a row. For example, there’s “The Veiled Shanghai” by Ken Liu, which is one for one, but reimagines the setting in China during the May Fourth Movement in 1919. This is immediately followed by Robin Swirsky’s “Beyond the Naked Eye,” which throws in a Hunger Games-esque competition in place of the original story, only to serve as the background events as an assassination plot unfolds. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have Robin Wasserman’s “One Flew Over the Rainbow” which is the bleak, gritty realistic “reimagining” by recasting the characters in a psych ward (no, it doesn’t have a twist, thank God), and manages one of a gut-punch. And then there’s “A Tornado of Dorothys,” which feels like a bigger metaphor for the collection itself, as we see a Dorothy land in Oz and confront the Dorothys that came before her and that the story doesn’t really end.
This is not to imply that every story in this collection is just reimaginings of Dorothy’s journey—the other half of the stories involved here are original tales set in the same world, sometimes using familiar charactes, others featuring nothing but original characters and nods to what’s come before. “The Great Zeppelin Heist of Oz” is an immensely fun prequel story that manages to play around with the character histories from what we know, “ and “The Cobbler of Oz” is a sweet fairy tale that is the perfect capper to the collection.
The only thing that I wasn’t as fond of were the number of stories that were darker—not to say that they were bad, but that’s when I felt things were getting a little too repetive in tone. Mainly the “darker side of the Emerald City” dystopic ones, which is a fair exploration, but again, those felt a little more like retreads than being interesting. I did like “Emeralds to Emeralds, Dust to Dust,” but when I got to “A Meeting in Oz,” I was getting bored with the ‘GRIMDARK in your beloved children’s story!” (See also “Dead Blue,” which is dark cyberpunk retelling that just didn’t quite work for me.)
I do really think that this is a strong collection overall—there’s stories in here that I didn’t like, but only one or two that I actively disliked, and even the ones I was lukewarm on, I did like the concept or the writing. And as I said, what works in its favor is that although there are similar stories or ideas, the writing and concepts vary wildly from story, and that’s what kept me interest throughout. I would definitely recommend checking this one out, even if all you know about Oz is the movie or Wicked.
*There were two Frank L. Baum books that I read so many times as a kid—Ozma of Oz being one, and the other was The Life and Times of Santa Claus. Which if you haven’t read, I still think it’s worth checking out. I might have to hunt down a copy and give it a reread, but I remember it being delightful.