Reimagines the story behind the creation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" from the perspective of L. Frank Baum's intrepid wife, Maud, whose hardscrabble life on the Dakota prairie inspires her husband's masterpiece and her advocacy of an exploited Judy Garland.

Hollywood, 1938. MGM is adapting her late husband's masterpiece for the screen, and seventy-seven-year-old Maud Gage Baum wants to be on the set. The moment she hears Judy Garland rehearsing the first notes of "Over the Rainbow," Maud recognizes the yearning that defined her own life story: from her youth as a suffragette's daughter to her coming of age as one of the first women in the Ivy League, from her blossoming romance with Frank to the hardscrabble prairie years that inspired The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. With the young actress under pressure from the studio as well as her ambitious stage mother, Maud resolves to protect her -- the way she tried so hard to protect the real Dorothy. -- adapted from back cover