Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz

Dorothy Gale is settling into life in California when the ground literally opens up beneath her. In the devastating earthquake of 1908, she and a young boy named Zeb plunge deep into the earth, where the adventure she never sought becomes the journey she cannot escape. The cracked ground delivers them into a surreal underground realm of glass towers and the mysterious, vain Wizard she once knew in Oz. This is not the cheerful Technicolor Oz of the movies - it is stranger, darker, a place where our heroes must solve riddles and face threats that feel genuinely perilous. Only six of the book's twenty chapters take place in Oz itself; the rest unfolds in eccentric kingdoms beneath the earth, populated by the peculiar Mangaboos and other fantastical beings. Baum, writing shortly after the San Francisco earthquake and weary of his own creation, produced something uniquely unsettling - a children's book that captures the terror of the ground giving way, and the strange comfort of finding magic precisely when the world falls apart.