Finding Dorothy by Elizabeth Letts is a charming imagining of the life of Mrs. Frank L. Baum.
In 1938 a seventy-seven-year-old Maud Baum pushes her way into MGM studios to fulfill her promise to her husband to always protect Dorothy. She isn't taken seriously, but nonplussed, continues to show up during the production of The Wizard of Oz to protect her husband's creation, so believed by children. She notices the appalling treatment endured by teenage actress Judy Garland and befriends the girl.
Maud Gage was the daughter of a well-connected suffragette who expected her to earn a college degree. Being a coed was hard enough in 1880; being the daughter of a notorious activist brought further harassment.
Visiting her college roommate's family she meets L. Frank Baum. He wins her heart--and her parent's approval, even though he was self-educated and ran a traveling troupe that performed his plays across the country.
Their life is filled with hardship and challenges, love and loss, taking them from New York State to touring the country, to the upper plains to Chicago, until Frank finally sets down on paper the stories he loves to tell.
Letts' story is based on actual events and persons. Some of the most amazing events in the novel actually happened.
As a girl in the 1950s, I was always so excited when The Wizard of Oz movie was aired on television. I was an adult before I saw it in color! I discovered very old copies of the Oz series in my elementary school library and read most of the books.
I enjoyed Finding Dorothy and I think you will, too. It was wonderful to learn about the "man behind the curtain" who imagined the Oz stories, and the strong woman he married. Judy Garland's experience of abuse mirror stories we still hear today.
I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
"A woman with a heart, a brain, courage to spare, and a girl’s sense of wonder—this is the heroine of Elizabeth Letts’s sparkling, touching. Maud Baum is the daughter of a suffragette and the wife of a dreamer, but she is also a force to be reckoned with in her own right.”—Melanie Benjamin, author of The Swans of Fifth Avenue
Letts' nonfiction books The Eighty-Dollar Champion, which I have read and enjoyed, and The Perfect Horse, which I should have read, have been best-sellers.
Finding Dorothy
by Elizabeth Letts
Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine
Pub Date 12 Feb 2019
ISBN 9780525622109
PRICE $28.00 (USD)
