My second plug for this week is in fact for the Oz books. Sure, they're silly unrepentant kid stuff, but they're richer than you might imagine. Watching the movie (though excellent) doesn't give one the full sense of the world, as one might expect. Partly because there are just so many books... but there are bits they changed in the movie too. My favorite one is that the Emerald City is not ... really... green. It's a normal old drab city. But! When you come up to the gate you are given green tinted glasses, which you are ordered by law to wear at all times. Voila! Instantly beautiful green city at a fraction of the cost!
My other favorite / subversive thing is from the second book, The Marvelous Land of Oz. It stars not Dorthy, but a little boy named Tip, who is being raised by a (different) evil witch. He escapes from the witch and has many adventures, creating many strange creatures along the way using the witches powder of life (the Gump is one of my favorite fantasy creations). In any case, little Tip eventually encounters Glinda, who reveals that he is actually the kidnapped heir to the throne of Oz, the princess Ozma. And our little boy protagonist gets transformed into a girl in the last third of the novel. That's right, a gender bending character in a novel published in 1904.
