Book Review – Finding Dorothy by Elizabeth Letts

About the Book

Hollywood, 1938: As soon as she learns that MGM is adapting her late husband’s masterpiece, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, for the screen, Maud Gage Baum sets about trying to visit the set. Nineteen years after Frank’s passing, Maud is the only person who can help the producers stay true to the spirit of the book – because she’s the only one left who knows its secrets.

In the young star, Judy, Maud recognizes the yearning that defined her own story, from her rebellious youth as a suffragette’s daughter to her coming of age as one of the first women in the Ivy League, to the hardscrabble prairie years with Frank that inspired his famous work. With the actress under pressure, Maud resolves to protect her – the way she tried to protect the real Dorothy. . .

Format: Paperback (368 pages) Publisher: Quercus
Publication date: 9th January 2020 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

Finding Dorothy didn’t unfold in quite the way I expected based on the blurb. True, we get an insight into Maud Baum’s efforts to ensure the film adaptation of her husband’s famous work stays true to the spirit of the book. It’s an effort that involves determination and, on occasions, some sleight of hand. We also see her efforts to protect the young Judy Garland, thrust into the limelight by her ambitious mother. As Maud observes, ‘What must the weight of so much expectation – of men, and their ambitions and desires – feel like on the shoulders of a lonely teenage girl.’ Those who know about Judy Garland’s troubled life will see only too well its origins in her early experiences.

What I wasn’t expecting from the book was for so much of it to be about Maud’s life. I’m not complaining though because I found this absolutely fascinating and very moving in places, especially her relationship with her husband, Frank. They go through some tough times together and it’s often Maud who has to pick up the pieces when Frank’s flights of fancy fail to take off. But it’s the ‘flights of fancy’, unconventional outlook on life and sense of adventure that make Frank the person he is. ‘The hard times were not what she remembered about their life together. It was the moments, incandescent, transcendent […] when she could catch a glimpse of a world beyond. This vision, this second sight, was what Frank Baum had given to Maud.’ And of course, in the end, that’s what Frank gave to the world in the form of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

I loved how the author included little details that eventually find a place in the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – a scarecrow, a blue gingham dress, the name Dorothy. And there is a very moving moment when Maud realises the story Frank is telling their sons about a tin man without a heart is essentially his own story, a man forced to take mundane jobs to pay the bills which don’t give him any fulfilment. We also learn just why Maud is so determined to ‘save’ Judy.

Finding Dorothy is a wonderful blend of fact and fiction, and I can now understand why so many readers have fallen in love with it.

I received a review copy courtesy of Quercus. Finding Dorothy is book 8 of my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

In three words: Emotional, engaging, uplifting

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About the Author

Elizabeth Letts is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Eighty-Dollar Champion and The Perfect Horse, which won the 2017 PEN Center USA Award Literary Award for research nonfiction, as well as two previous novels, Quality of Care and Family Planning. A former certified nurse-midwife, she also served in the Peace Corps in Morocco. She lives in Southern California and Northern Michigan. (Photo: Goodreads author page)

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