Subscribe to our newsletter
Enter your email address below and subscribe to our newsletter
June 2025 Book Review: Before Dorothy
Book by: Hazel Gaynor
Review by: Dr. Wendy Hooper-Meletes, Ed.D., owner of Litchfield Books
The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s:
Hazel finds it easy to allow her true feelings to embroider themselves among her words. The imagined lives and experiences of her characters are a work of fiction. However, history formed the roots of this book. On the southern Great Plains Kansas farmers were subject to the blow of the Dust Bowl that practically took the last hope of the people. Only rain was needed to make it a perfect place to live. Many Kansas wheat farmers took the storms in stride, they simply had too much invested in their lands to leave. Their determination to adapt is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the efforts of author Hazel Gaynor as she puts a different twist on the Oz Book and movie.
In Baum’s modernized fairytale Oz book published in 1900, Aunt Em is the faithful wife of Dorothy’s Uncle Henry who is a Kansas farmer. Em is strict and not very affectionate, but loves her niece Dorothy Gale very much. Emily has spent most of her middle-aged life surrounded by a bleak landscape working on a prairie farm in Kansas for decades. Unlike the classic Oz film of 1939, Hazel Gaynor felt Emily whispered in her ear as she recounts who Emily Gale is for the first time, young and pretty, a sparkle to her blue eyes with a merry laugh much like Dorothy’s.
How Dorothy comes to live with Emily and Henry Gale, even though L. Baum’s Oz book never clarifies if Dorothy is blood related, adopted or was just a simple farmhand sent to help now becomes the backdrop for Hazel’s book. Aunt Em has a much bigger role in this timeless tale, leaving Oz where it rightly belongs. Before Dorothy ever steps on the well-worn Yellow Brick Road Auntie Em is bursting with courage as she raises Dorothy as her own. The past catches up with the present when Leo the rainmaker Wizard can’t provide rain but does provide old secrets that become exposed. Emily fears she will lose the most cherished thing of all: Dorothy.
Come meet author Hazel Gaynor on Friday June 20th, 2025 at Litchfield Country Club from 11-1pm where she will help you to imagine the lives of Emily, Henry, Dorothy- and Toto right down to the SILVER shoes with pointed toes. Tickets must be purchased in advance at www.litchfieldbooks.com/events
The Wizard of Oz Resources:
L.Frank Baum, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Lawrence Svobida, Farming the Dust Bowl
