The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Down that road Dorothy walks toward a mysterious Great Wizard she hopes can send her home. Along the way she gathers the strangest of companions: a straw Scarecrow who believes he has no brains yet keeps devising the clever solutions that save them all, a rusted Tin Woodman who longs for a heart, and an enormous Lion who confesses, meekly nursing his nose after Dorothy slaps it, that he is a coward. Each aches for the very thing the others can already see in him.

Baum tells it with plain wonder and a gently comic touch: pathos and mischief sitting easily side by side, as when a proud Scarecrow's self-regard meets a crow's deflating honesty.

And underneath all the color runs a single thread of homesickness. "There is no place like home," Dorothy says, and that longing follows her down every emerald street and across every poppy field. Everyone here sets out to be given what they lack, and learns along the way what earning it might mean instead. The door is open. The road is yellow, and it runs a long, marvelous way.