Reading The Lost Princess of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Lost Princess of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

After the one-two punch of The Scarecrow of Oz and Rinkitink, I felt like I was missing the Oz characters. Sure, they showed up in those massive celebrations at the end of each book (by now a traditional way for Baum to squeeze in all your favorite characters) but I missed all those folks, you know? Baum must have felt the same way (or, rather, known his readers would) because Lost Princess of Oz contrives to include a large number of familiar characters.

Originally published: 1917
Acquired: April 2022
Read aloud: May 2022

The premise here is that overnight, a number of things vanish: Glinda's Great Book of Records, the magical tools of both Glinda and the Wizard, Ozma's Magic Picture, (in the far-off Yip Country) a Magic Dishpan... and Ozma herself! Our characters must search the country without any of their customary powers at their disposal. They divide into four search parties, one for each of the four quadrants of Oz. Without any actual leads, their plans are apparently to just wander around looking for stuff; it seems to me that had Ozma been in the Gillikin Country, being searched by the Shaggy Man, his brother, Tik-Tok, and Jack Pumpkinhead, she might be lost still. Thankfully, she turns out to be in the Winkie Country, which is (wow what a coincidence) being search by the largest group, consisting of Dorothy, Trot, Betsy Bobbin, Button-Bright, the Wizard, Scraps the Patchwork Girl, the Cowardly Lion, the Woozy, the Sawhorse, and Toto. As they go, even more join the group: the Frogman, Cayke the Cookie Cook, and the Lavender Bear.

For the most part, Baum does an okay job by this large cast of characters. The Wizard gets some good problem-solving moments, and Scraps's sideways logic also comes in handy at times. Button-Bright's ability to get lost actually turns out to be a key plot point. The animal characters don't contribute much to the plot, but there are a couple scenes where they talk to each other a lot; in fact, Toto talks an unprecedented amount here, a marked contrast to his reticence to speak in Tik-Tok. The Woozy never really does anything, though; I have a feeling that Baum included him just because Neill like drawing him. (In many of the books, Neill includes the Woozy in crowd scenes where he is not mentioned in the text; this book has an illustration of the Woozy wearing an apron and doing dishes in the Magic Dishpan! Not a thing that actually happens but a delight to look at.)

The main issue is that having all three girls in the group is pretty pointless: narratively Dorothy, Trot, and Betsy are the same, and thus Trot and Betsy end up largely not doing anything. I think if Baum wanted to flesh out the relationship between the three girls (which would be a fun thing to do), he would have had to do something like make it be just the three of them. Or if he wanted to give Trot and Betsy something to do, he should have sent them out with other search parties (and given those search parties something to do). The working title was Three Girls in Oz, but reading the finished book, you can see why he dropped it.

Anyway, the whole thing is good fun. It does sort of beggar belief that Dorothy's search party finds Ozma in the third place they look after setting out in a totally random direction, and some of the rules Baum imposes on this "mystery" don't really make any sense (the characters conclude that Ozma must be in Oz because no one can cross the Deadly Desert... two books ago, Trot herself flew into Oz over the Deadly Desert!), and Baum seems to forget how the Magic Belt works (but if it did work here as it had in Ozma of Oz, the book would end around chapter five).

But it does the thing I like an Oz book to do: interesting places to visit, weird problems for the characters to reason their ways out of, good interactions between the characters. The misdirection of the clues about where Ozma is according to the truth-speaking Little White Bear are pretty cleverly done. I like any Oz book with Button-Bright comedy. I don't know what's up with the "Toto loses his growl subplot" but it is entertaining. The Frogman is an interesting character... though my favorite new character was Corporal Waddle, the little toy brown bear soldier who takes himself and his useless popgun very seriously. Stay tuned for Corporal Waddle in Oz?

My son seemed to enjoy it: lots of characters doing fun things. When I asked, he said, "I liked it the same as Rinkitink. I liked the good parts but didn't like the bad parts." The "bad parts" turned out to be the passage detailing how Ugu the Shoemaker traveled around Oz stealing all the magical implements and kidnapping Ozma. He also began telling me about his own oz book, [His Name] in Oz, which is exactly the same as The Lost Princess of Oz, except that he presses a button that defeats Ugu the Shoemaker so no one gets kidnapped! But more on that book in future installments...

One other thing to note: this is the first set-in-Oz novel Baum wrote after the publication of Tik-Tok, which included for the first time detailed maps of Oz. You can tell, because the descriptions of Oz geography suddenly become much more detailed and consistent here; Baum talks about rivers in the Winkie Country are, and what characterizes different regions of it. He continues to pay attention to geography in this way over the remaining three of his Oz novels, unlike the somewhat ad hoc way he had described things previously.