Reading The Road to Oz Aloud to My Son

The Road to Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

Like Marvelous Land of Oz, Road to Oz is one where my childhood copy was a Puffin Classic. The Puffin edition of Marvelous Land was sparsely illustrated... the Puffin of Road was not illustrated at all! Thus it is probably little wonder that Road was never one of my favorite Oz novels, with no pictures to fire the imagination. I eagerly picked up the Books of Wonder facsimile, then, as I knew that—like the original—it had colored paper for pages. Though this is (I think) the only one of Baum's original fourteen to have no color illustrations, the colors shift as the characters travel from land to land as they progress from Kansas to the Emerald City. I found the colors somewhat ill-chosen (why are the Winkie chapters not yellow!?), but they definitely worked as intended on my son, who was excited every time the pages changed color, and often demanded we skip ahead so they would change color. ("I want to read a green chapter!") The illustrations are great, too, and I'm sorry I didn't have them as a child.

Originally published: 1909
Acquired and read aloud: September 2021

Road is a pretty aimless Oz novel. Unlike in previous Oz journey narratives (Wonderful Wizard and Dorothy and the Wizard), there's little sense of impetus or threat. The characters have to get to Oz in time for a birthday party. Not exactly high stakes. On top of that, they get there about two-thirds of the way through, and the last third is just descriptions of people coming to the party and games they play and revisits with characters from previous books (we see the Tin Woodman's Tin Castle and Jack Pumpkinhead's giant pumpkinhead house; Billina updates us on how many progeny she has). So this is the other reason this one has never ranked highly.

But it turns out that if you're reading one or two chapters aloud a day, that something is episodic isn't a bug... it's a feature! The book becomes a succession of short stories. Maybe Baum knew what he was doing after all. I did particularly like the encounter with the Scoodlers (I love Button-Bright's "don't want to be soup!"), and Son One seemed to be into Johnny Dooit. Indeed, he was pretty into this one overall, telling me he had a dog head after we read about Button-Bright and the Shaggy Man getting fox and donkey heads, and repeating Button-Bright's trademark "don't know" a lot and even telling his mother about John Dough, the living gingerbread man (a crossover with Baum's John Dough and the Cherub, the only of Baum's Nonestic/Burzee fantasies I don't own). He was also quick to point out that my Shaggy Man voice is pretty much my Scarecrow voice. Hey, a guy can only make so many voices.

I did still think it dragged once they got to Oz, though. And everyone here seems to totally forget about Ozma and Dorothy's daily Magic Picture check-in from the previous book! Which, to be fair, would end this book before it started... but that's why it was such a bad idea to begin with.