Was

Oh, Was, how I love your relentlessly bleak, depressing sadness.

This is a strangely inventive novel that twines reality and fantasy into a brutal, desolate, yet gorgeous story of pain and survival. Told from the points of view of numerous characters, each story is tethered in some way to The Wizard of Oz, that venerable fable about good versus evil in the search for home.

Ryman introduces us to a main trio of characters whose lives are all equally harrowing–Dorothy Gael (the imagined inspiration for The Wizard of Oz heroine and the victim of familial sexual abuse), Frances… show more.

Ryman describes himself as a fantasy writer who fell in love with realism, and there’s something of that in each of the novels I’ve chosen here. In Was he draws together three story strands and weaves from them something unique and moving around the cultural tentpole of The Wizard of Oz. The main strand concerns little Dorothy Gael whose harsh life inspires Baum’s fictional revision of her unhappy childhood: then there’s ‘baby Frances’ who, as Judy Garland, embodies Dorothy in screen fantasy: and Frank, a dying man for whom Garland’s movie has been a lifelong obsession and source of… show more.

Was jumps back and forth over a century, from the 1870s to the 1990s, telling the stories of a half dozen characters—including the "real" Dorothy Gael and the young Judy Garland—all connected by their relation to L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels.

This is a moving story about how people cope with troubles they cannot overcome, finding healing in the midst of tragedy. I really like the many subtle ways Oz weaves in and out of the characters’ lives, through fantasy and reality: indulging in fantasy may lead people to behave destructively, but it also offers escape when we are feeling… show more.