Finding Dorothy - Elizabeth Letts

I imagine that most people of a certain age have at least a passing fondness and curiosity about the movie "The Wizard of Oz." That "certain age" spans several decades because the movie was released in 1939 and for many years (through 1980) it was broadcast annually on network television. But despite that interest in the movie, I doubt that many of us who grew up after the 1950s or so actually read the L. Frank Baum book upon which the film is based - or that we know very much at all about the author's personal life.

Finding Dorothy by Elizabeth Letts can change that. The book is based on research the author did concerning the shooting of the movie and the life of Baum. Baum's story is an interesting one, and the fact that he chose Maude Gage to be his wife, made it even more interesting. Gage was the daughter of a leading suffragist of the period, and she was raised to be an independent woman of strong will, something that was not particularly common in her day. 

The story is a series of flashbacks from 1939, when the movie was being shot, back to the 1870s and later while Frank Baum and Maude Gage were struggling to make a life together, a struggle that would continue right up until the point that Baum had the inspiration for his most famous book. The 1939 portion of the story sees Maude take the young Judy Garland under her wing while trying to make sure that the film would live up to her husband's beloved book.  Neither task was easy because the young Judy Garland was easy prey for those wanting to take advantage of her youth, and movie executives were not particularly protective of the book's content - after all, they had a movie to make.

Bottom Line: Fans of "The Wizard of Oz" will find this one hard to resist, but Finding Dorothy did leave me wishing that more time had been spent on the movie portion of the book. I learned a lot about both the film and Baum's biography, but I'm left with the feeling that too much meat was left on the bone.  I just have the feeling that this one could have been even better than it is.