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L Frank Baum's American classic blends elements of grotesque fantasy with ordinary magic to explore goodness versus greatness and evil. Friendship and the importance of home is at the heart of the story. Things in Oz are often not what they appear to be and the power of belief is central to the story.

Many are familiar with the broad strokes of the story due to the popularity of the 1939 movie, though the original story is somewhat different. A cyclone carries a little girl and her dog from the gray Kansas prairie to the colorful land of Oz. Dorothy accidentally kills the Wicked Witch of the East, earning the good will of the people she had enslaved and the good witch of the North, who gives her a blessing of protection and sends her on a country across the fantastical land to seek the help from the "Great" Wizard of Oz. Along the way, she makes friends with a scarecrow, tin man, and lion, who are in need of belief in themselves. Together the band of travels overcome dangers on a quest to find ones place in the world.

Dorothy's accidental and regretful acts of destruction are contrast with the more "wicked" purposeful hoodwinking, violence toward, and enslavement of others for personal gain perpetuated by other characters. Characters such as the witches and the Wizard represents the balance between "terrible" power and the measure of being a good person. The story has a hopeful message --both in finding our own power and in the ability to use our power to help others. This choice is the measure of good and wickedness in the novel.

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On re-reading this novel, I was struck by Baum's expressed intention in writing a "modernized" [turn of the 20th century] fairytale, which he defined in his preface as a story filled with "wonder and joy" and without moralistic "heartaches and nightmares." Oz is a fantastical land, divided into regions under the rule or enslavement by four witch -- two good and two bad -- and a humbug wizard. After a tornado drops her across a great desert in Oz, Dorothy, at first innocently, and then in her quest to go home to Kansas, sets out on a journey in which she liberates the peoples across Oz from various forms of tyranny and enslavement.