Finding Dorothy

Long before Judy Garland became Dorothy, Maud Gage Baum lived the story that inspired L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. This novel follows Maud, the widow of the author, through two timelines. One traces her girlhood as the headstrong daughter of a prominent suffragist and her years on the prairie in South Dakota with Frank, when they neighbored the people, especially a young girl named Dorothy, who would shape his famous book. The other is set in 1939, when Maud, then seventy-eight, meets sixteen-year-old Judy on the film set. Judy is pressured by the director, the producer, and her ambitious stage mother to diet, flatten her figure, and display laughter, tears, and terror whenever asked. Maud hears Judy sing "Over the Rainbow" and recalls the hard years in Dakota, when she and her husband struggled to get by until Frank's book became a sensation. She once promised to look after the original Dorothy in Aberdeen, and now she takes on the same task for Judy.