The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The pitch

A Kansas farm girl is carried by tornado into a country of witches, talking scarecrows, and one enormous humbug. It’s the great American fairy tale — written to be, in Baum’s own words, a wonder-tale with “the heartaches and nightmares left out,” which is exactly why it still works on a modern eight-year-old.

What to know

The chapters are short and something new happens in almost every one. We’ve found it’s one of the easiest classics to start with, especially if your child has seen the movie. They’ll already know the characters, and the book will still surprise them. The story keeps going past the Emerald City, into chapters the film never touched, and the Tin Woodman’s backstory and the china country are stranger than anything the movie shows. Grades 3–6 can read it on their own, and it makes a great read-aloud from about age six.

Life when written

Baum wrote it in Chicago in 1900, when America was still more farm than city and a Kansas homestead really was a small gray house on an enormous gray prairie. Electricity was a marvel most families had never touched, and the gleaming White City of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair — which many believe inspired the Emerald City — had just shown Americans what a magical metropolis might look like. Fairy tales still came from Europe; Baum set out to write the first great one that was American to the bone.