Sky Island: Being the Further Exciting Adventures of Trot and Cap'n Bill after Their Visit to the Sea Fairies
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
After we finished The Sea Fairies, my son was keen that Trot and Cap'n Bill should get to Oz. I did tell him that would happen someday, but also that we would first read Sky Island, where that did not happen... but what would happen is that they would meet a couple familiar characters, specifically Button-Bright and Polychrome, both of whom originated in The Road to Oz. He remembers Button-Bright if I go "don't know," his refrain in that novel (he's aged up a bit here), and we had actually just re-encountered Polychrome in Tik-Tok of Oz (which is out of publication order but I think worked well here).
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| Originally published: 1912 Acquired: February 2017 Previously read: March 2017 Read aloud: January–March 2022 |
This is one of my favorite of Baum's fantasies, and it held up for me on a reread. It has a good role for Cap'n Bill, Button-Bright shows some real ingenuity, and Trot gets a great starring role in the last few chapters especially. It basically fixes everything I didn't like about The Sea Fairies. On the other hand, I'm not sure it maintained my three-year-old son's interest; it has a more complex plot than most of your Baum journey novels, and I don't think he was terrible interested in, say, whether Ghip-Ghisizzle should rule the Blue Country. We had a bit of a slowdown in the middle of the book; we started it right at the end of January, but there was a period where he very rarely wanted to read it, and so we didn't wrap up until early March.
That said, he did ask some good questions (I drew him a map to explain how the fog bank dividing Sky Island worked when we wanted to know why they didn't just go around it), and he always got a kick out of the doggerel of the talking blue parrot that barks like a dog; he also had a big reaction to when the elephant-shaped handle of Button-Bright's magic umbrella transforms into a real elephant.
The villain of Sky Island, the Boolooroo, punishes people by "patching" them: he cuts two people in half (no Blueskin can die until they are exactly six hundred years old and pass through the Arch of Phinis) and then stitches half of one to half of the other, creating two hybrids. This kind of thing is horrifying if you think about it as an adult, but just vaguely amusing to a toddler. Anyway, one day at dinner a week or so after we finished the book, he suggested that he could combine two different candies by "patching" them into one! Not a connection I expected him to make, but I was charmed.
Sky Island is rife was interesting worldbuilding, and tantalizing hints about things that are never explained, such as the Arch of Phinis, or the fog bank. I'm a bit surprised that none of the modern-day writers of Oz fan stuff, who have picked over so much of the minutiae of the original Baum novels and explained and expanded it, have (as far as I know) gone back to Sky Island and found out how it is fairing. Trot is technically, after all, still its queen! Seems like an obvious sequel hook. (EDIT: Apparently there is a short story in the 1983 issue of Oziana where Trot uses the Magic Belt to go back.)
(Incidentally, Trot must have read at least some of the Oz books because she knows about the country, but apparently Road to Oz was not one of them because she doesn't know who Button-Bright is.)
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