Reading The Magic of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Magic of Oz: A Faithful Record of the Remarkable Adventures of Dorothy and Trot and the Wizard of Oz, together with the Cowardly Lion, the Hungry Tiger and Cap'n Bill, in their successful search for a Magical and Beautiful Birthday Present for Princess Ozma of Oz
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

This, the penultimate Oz novel by Baum, I did have decent memories of from childhood, mostly of the magic word of transformation, Pyrzqxgl, which allows the speaker to transform any person into any thing. Kiki Aru, a Munchkin boy bored from living on dull Mount Munch, discovers the word and uses it to transform himself into an eagle and tour the countries adjacent to Oz; in Ev, he bumps into the old Nome King, Ruggedo, homeless since the events of Tik-Tok of Oz. Ruggedo persuades Kiki to use the magic word to create an army of beasts and help him conquer the Emerald City.

Originally published: 1919
Acquired: April 2022
Read aloud: May 2022

Meanwhile, the members of Ozma's court are looking for presents to get Ozma for her birthday. But what do you get the fairy princess who has everything? Trot, Cap'n Bill, and the Glass Cat travel to get a magic flower that the Glass Cat found on her travels; meanwhile, Dorothy and the Wizard go (along with the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger) to find some monkeys, because Dorothy's idea is to miniaturize some, train them to dance, and have them jump out of Ozma's birthday cake. (I guess when you live in a utopia, you have to seek what amusement you can.)

These three strands weave in and out of each other. Dorothy and the Wizard get to the Forest of Gugu right as Ruggedo is trying to assemble a beast army; Trot and Cap'n Bill get trapped on the island of the magic flower, and so the Glass Cat comes to ask the Wizard for help. I found it enjoyable to read a chapter at a time: it's nice to hear from Trot, Cap'n Bill, and the Glass Cat again, none of whom have had much to do across the past few books. I always like Cap'n Bill's practicality—he reasons some clever stuff about how to deal with the magic flower—and the flower itself is an interesting threat. I like getting to see the Glass Cat show off her stuff; Baum writes cats so well. The way the transformations are used is clever—there is some fun stuff where all the principal characters end up in weird bodies—and I like the way Kiki and Ruggedo are always trying to figure out how to out-scheme the other.

But when you finish the whole book, it all seems a bit dissatisfying, in that the book promises something more exciting than you actually got. The idea that Ruggedo might raise an army of beasts is an interesting one, but he doesn't really get anywhere with it; the beasts aren't really convinced by his rhetoric,* and the Wizard defeats them almost accidentally, and kind of anticlimactically. One kind of wishes the three plots converged in a way that made everything explode, rather than a way where they all kind of neutralize each other. The Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger coming back to wild beasts after so much time living in the Emerald City seems to have potential, but Baum doesn't do anything with it.

So, overall, a solid but uninspiring late-period Oz novel. My son seemed to enjoy it, and he did not like the idea that the magic island might cause Trot and Cap'n Bill to shrink away to nothing. I think it was while reading this one that he told me how [His Name] in Oz would begin: "A magician will send me to Oz, because he doesn't know I live in Florida, he thinks I live in Oz!" Which, to be honest, seems like the way an Oz novel really could begin.

* Though it was published after the war, I am pretty sure both this and Glinda of Oz were written during it, and you can definitely see traces of it in both. Here, we have would-be dictators amassing armies.