Was
by Geoff RymanSign in to Goodreads to see your friends' reviews of this book.
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Read in January, 2006
The one where a girl named Dorothy loses her parents in an epidemic and is sent out to the frontier, to Kansas, to live with her Auntie Em and Uncle Henry. She's abused and driven mad, but not before telling a story to a schoolteacher named Baum. Meanwhile, in the present day, a horror-movie actor named Jonathan is searching for Judy Garland's history while dying of AIDS, and his psychiatrist remembers meeting elderly Dorothy in an asylum.
Memorable, but kind of a mess.
The book begins wit...more
Memorable, but kind of a mess.
The book begins wit...more
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Read in January, 2004
recommends it for:
Fans of 'The Wizard of Oz'
Author Ryman is most notably a British sci-fi author and in 1990, he wrote 'Was' for a more mainstream audience. It is an act of brilliant writing for a British author to so clearly describe the brutal Kansas plains of the late 1800s, and with the first few pages, the reader is caught up in the twisted story of a sexually abused Dorothy Gale, the sexually confused childhood of Frances Gumm, and the valiant efforts of a dying actor hoping to make one final stage exit as a Scarecrow.
Although ...more
Although ...more
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recommends it for:
Anyone who loves fiction and reality combined
Ryman threads the life stories of Judy Gumm (Judy Garland before her name was changed), Frank Baum (the author of the Wizard of Oz, and a fictional modern day actor daying of AIDS until the three plots final weave together.
Ryman has a brilliant, fluid imagination. This book still moves me today. I saw a stage adaptation of this book at Victory Gardens in Chicago and was almost as impressed by how the theatre company brought these different worlds of each character so seamlessly together.
Ryman has a brilliant, fluid imagination. This book still moves me today. I saw a stage adaptation of this book at Victory Gardens in Chicago and was almost as impressed by how the theatre company brought these different worlds of each character so seamlessly together.
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Read in March, 2001
This is a retelling of the Oz books with some of the movie mythology thrown in. It reimagines L. Frank Baum himself, Dorothy Gael and her family, Judy Garland, and a host of other familar characters. Ryman doesn't just add background to them, he adds real depth to the whole Oz phenomenon. The stories are moving and skillfully interwoven. I loved this book and it's one of the ones that got me actively seeking out parallel novels.
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Read in January, 2006
...I still don't know why, in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy kept wanting to go home.
Was has a sense of magic, and beauty. And it is full of sad stuff. Well, has very sad things happening in it.
The people in it feel very real, even the ones that I wish didn't.
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Read in June, 2004
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
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Read in July, 2008
For whatever reason, I've been struggling to get a review for Was done. Maybe cause I finished it on vacation, and upon my return, had to give it back to the library and so my copy's gone and I've not read a page of it in two weeks. Or maybe it's just so good as to be unreviewable. Or more likely, it's because there's so many different things going on in this book that my brain got frazzled trying to pick a place to begin. In such cases it's best to apply okkam’s razor. The simpler...more
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Read in April, 2008
I have a hard time deciding how much i like this book. "Was" is the story of several people whose lives are interwoven over the span of a century - oddly by Oz. It follows Dorothy Gael, an orphan living with her aunt in Kansas, from childhood into old age. She becomes the inspiration for Frank Baum to write his classic "The Wizard of OZ." The lives of Judy Garland, Jonathan, an actor dying of AIDS, and Bill Davison, a psychologist, are all touched by either the "real&...more
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Read in October, 2007
recommends it for:
people interested in frontier history and Oz
This book was very slow to start. In fact, I almost gave up on it. But I'm glad I stuck with it because it became a very interesting, enjoyable book. The book explores how Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz came to be. It posits, What if there was a Dorothy who lived in Kansas with her Aunty Em and Uncle Henry, and what if L. Frank Baum met her while he was traveling across the country, and what if her hard life as a poor orphan inspired him to reimagine her life to include a trip to Oz? The...more
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Read in January, 2008
As I looked over a few reviews about the book, it seems that readers approached it with the expectation that it would be 'Fantasy.' One person concluded that it was 'anti-fantasy' because it exploded the fantasy around the Wizard of Ox, creating the reality that the fantasy had come from, which was not the prettiest place.
Like The King's Last Song, the book goes back and forth between times, following the lives of Dorothy Gael, an orphan sent to live with her Aunty Em, Jonathan, a gay...more
Like The King's Last Song, the book goes back and forth between times, following the lives of Dorothy Gael, an orphan sent to live with her Aunty Em, Jonathan, a gay...more
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Read in October, 2007
This is a brilliant and compelling fictional exploration of the myths and history that make up the world of Frank Baum's OZ. The characters include a real-life Dorothy whose life in Kansas at the turn of the 19th century is hard and devastating, a young Judy Garland before she becomes a legend, a farm boy who is led off his obvious path by his encounter with Dorothy, and a young man at the height of the AIDS crisis who searches out evidence for Dorothy's influence on Baum's book. All of the re...more
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This novel which revolves around another book, The Wizard of Oz, is a very engaging and unusual read. It's about how Dorothy, a lonely, abused orphan forced to live with her aunt and uncle in Kansas inspires a kind, compassionate teacher, Frank Baum to write The Wizard of Oz. The plot is threefold. There is also a gay man in the 80's who is dying of aids and fascinated with Oz and finding out about the roots of the real Dorothy Gale. Then there is another subplot involving Judy Garland who uses...more
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I found some parts of this riff on The Wizard of Oz genuinely, powerfully moving--Ethel Gumm's regretful monologue about her daughter Judy Garland, the breakdown of Jonathan's relationship with Ira as he dies of AIDS, Dorothy's death and her final dream of home, a masterful twist on the end of the film. But there were also long stretches that I found a little boring, a few spots that seemed too obvious (Jonathan loses his ability to imagine and goes colorblind...), and a very irritating ...more
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Read in April, 2002
Of all the novels on my reading list, Was has been there the longest. 10 years ago I wrote this one down after it was mentioned on "Prisoners of Gravity", a very good science fiction/comic journal that ran for about 4 years on TVO, and saved Was for whenever I was in the mood for it.
It took 10 years for the mood to hit, and to coincide with actually tracking the novel down.
Well it was worth the wait. Was is one of the more original novels I have ever read. It involves three story...more
It took 10 years for the mood to hit, and to coincide with actually tracking the novel down.
Well it was worth the wait. Was is one of the more original novels I have ever read. It involves three story...more
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Read in January, 1998
recommends it for:
cynics
I read this book for a Post Modern fiction class in college and enjoyed the dark, sinister twist the author brought to the best known story of Dorothy & the Wizard of Oz.
Ryman takes the characters of Dorothy, Aunt Em and the surrounding figures on that isolated Kansas farm and puts them in a much more violent, realistic setting...an action that ultimately makes the "adventures" in Oz all the more tragic.
I would reccommend this book to readers who enjoyed Wicked by G...more
Ryman takes the characters of Dorothy, Aunt Em and the surrounding figures on that isolated Kansas farm and puts them in a much more violent, realistic setting...an action that ultimately makes the "adventures" in Oz all the more tragic.
I would reccommend this book to readers who enjoyed Wicked by G...more
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Read in July, 2008
I like books that draw their inspiration from other books. As long as they do it well. And this does it well.
Ryman weaves together different stories of different characters all loosely connected by The Wizard of Oz. It reminded me a lot of what Michael Cunningham does with Mrs Dalloway and Walt Whitman.
Some of the connections are obvious, some less so. Some are uplifting, but many have a gentle melancholy, a sadness of what has passed, what is lost and a yearning for home.
His aft...more
Ryman weaves together different stories of different characters all loosely connected by The Wizard of Oz. It reminded me a lot of what Michael Cunningham does with Mrs Dalloway and Walt Whitman.
Some of the connections are obvious, some less so. Some are uplifting, but many have a gentle melancholy, a sadness of what has passed, what is lost and a yearning for home.
His aft...more
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Read in September, 2007
I enjoyed reading this book because the prose was frequently compelling. But at the end I was kind of wondering how I got here and why I'd come. It was often icky. Bad things happened, and there's no redemption. I think people who want to think about art like that kind of thing, so maybe this is art. I'll still read more Geoff Ryman, but I don't think I'll read this one again.
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This book is so brilliant and so difficult to describe. Imagine L. Frank Baum as a school teacher in Kansas who decides to write "The Wizard of Oz" because he envisions a better life for one of his students.
Ryman flawlessly blends past and present, fact and fiction into a completely original tale that is heartbreaking and riveting.
Ryman flawlessly blends past and present, fact and fiction into a completely original tale that is heartbreaking and riveting.
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Read in October, 2008
It seems like there are lots of takes on the Wizard of Oz, but this one is different because it explores not just the fantasy realm of Oz, but its connection to a historical context. Ryman's story includes Kansas pioneers and farmers, how the movie was made,and people whose lives were touched by the story over the years.
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book data (includes all editions)
avg rating (all editions): 4.11 (209 ratings) avg rating (this edition): 4.06 (182 ratings) number of reviews: 41
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quote
"There is no man so unsuited for the task of speaking about memory as I am, for I find scarcely a trace of it in myself, and I do not believe there is another man in the world so hideously lacking in it."
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