Grampa In Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill
Thompson's fourth Oz novel has often been accused of being derivative of her second, and it's pretty hard to disagree. Like in Kabumpo in Oz, a prince of a small pocket kingdom in Oz goes on a quest, looking for a princess; on the way, he begins to have feelings for a strange girl, only to discover in the end that the girl is actually a princess under enchantment, and so everything works out.
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| Originally published: 1924 Acquired: June 2022 Read aloud: June–July 2022 |
I don't think this is a problem per se; if Grampa in Oz had been as well done as Kabumpo, I think I would have liked it as much regardless of how derivative it was. And I did like it: Prince Tatters of Ragbad is accompanied by an old soldier nicknamed "Grampa" (the only soldier left in Ragbad, more on that later), a Chicago weathercock brought to life who goes by the name of Bill (and who comes by it, for that matter), and a flower fairy named Urtha (she's the one who turns out to be a princess, Princess Pretty Good of Perhaps City). Meanwhile, Dorothy is travelling in the Winkie Country and bumps into Percy Vere, the Forgetful Poet of Perhaps City, himself looking for Perhaps City's lost princess. It's a fun set of characters. Grampa is entertaining, but I particularly liked the single-minded weathercock, who embraces Tatters's quest wholeheartedly, and thus is always demanding of everyone if they are a princess and/or have a fortune, and immediately loses interest if not. Percy is also a good character: his gimmick is that he always forgets the last words of his poems, leaving other characters to fill it in—or rather, the listener. My three-year-old son is still attempting to grok the concept of rhymes, but he did get it right on a couple occasions, much to his delight and mine. Some of the escapades on the way are pretty fun, particularly the bandits of the Blue Forest and the wicked washwomen of Monday Mountain and the dragon with false teeth on the island of Isa Poso. The book features a prophecy that isn't fulfilled the way you except, which is well done.
But somehow even though I enjoyed any individual chapter, on the whole it didn't quite grab me. I think this is because Prince Tatters and Urtha lack the level of definition Thompson gave the similar characters of Prince Pompa and Peg Amy. Tatters very much feels like he's always along for the ride, and even though Urtha's thing of flowers sprouting wherever she steps is fun, she does little else other than be dainty and nice—compare to how Peg Amy brings out the best in Wag and Kabumpo, touching everyone around her. When it's revealed that Peg Amy was the Princess of Sun Top Mountain, there was an emotional catharsis; here, when it turned out that Urtha was the princess, it's a good if predictable plot twist (though my son's mind was boggled), but I didn't feel anything, and I know Thompson can make me feel.
Thompson has her own vision of Oz that isn't Baum's... but then Baum's vision of Oz in one book wasn't necessarily his vision in his next, either. We hear about money in Oz for the first time in a long while; Ragbad used to export cloth to the rest of Oz, but Prince Tatters's father, King Fumbo, stopped paying his laborers when he took the throne because he spent the money on books instead. Without money, the laborers mostly deserted the country, and those who were left weren't enough to do all the cloth picking, leading to a downward spiral. But I don't mind because it's a fun story. The army deserted when they were no longer being paid, leaving only Grampa.
Grampa, we're told, was the veteran of 980 battles. But when were all these wars, and who was the army of Ragbad fighting? Maybe it all fits into the interregnum period, after Ozma's grandfather was deposed by the wicked witches, before Ozma took the throne. One can imagine that during the era of the wicked witches and the reign of the Wizard of Oz, there was a lot of combat in Oz between the small kingdoms. Did Ragbad attack the Munchkin country and fight whatever army the Tin Soldier belonged to? Did Grampa and his fellows march with the armies of Glinda as she retook the Quadling Country from the Wicked Witch of the South? Like so much about Oz history, I guess we will never know... which is exactly what makes it so interesting.
Like with Cowardly Lion, Grampa recently came into the public domain and thus has been released as a print-on-demand edition from SeaWolf Press. The quotation marks all go the right way here, but like with Cowardly Lion it reproduces at least one error from the Project Gutenberg edition: the bandit Vaga briefly becomes "Yaga" for a couple pages, which I suspect was an OCR error Gutenberg's proofreaders missed. One of the chapters is also missing its header illustration. But still, for $8, you can't do much better, as no one else has bothered to release this run of Thompsons since Del Rey in the 1980s.
We finished this the first week of July 2022. It was in July 2021 that we finished The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In my post about that, I wrote, "Baum's original fourteen or fifteen will keep us some time... and then I guess there's always the rest of the Famous Forty!" I don't think I could have guessed that a year later we would finish our twenty-third Oz book, meaning we average almost two per month. We were done with Baum's original fourteen in eleven months, and that was with detouring into a few of his non-Oz fantasies and a quasi-canonical book. The first six or so seem a bit foggy in his memory; I feel like mostly he knows those through me reminding me about them. But he seems to have a pretty solid memory of everything we've read from Tik-Tok/Sky Island on, to varying degrees; every now and then he comes out with some half-remembered fact that really surprises me.
It's been quite a time. I love seeing his imagination at work, I love getting to share something I was passionate about, I love getting to delve into parts of Oz I never even read as a kid (or at least, don't remember reading), I love that clearly he has my interest in completing and listing things. I made a list of all the canonical and quasi-canonical Oz books, which comes out to fifty-eight right now, although that assumes we add no more Oz-adjacent books to it (we've done five so far, and there are around seven more we could do). I'm writing this shy of his fourth birthday, though it's being posted much later. Fifty-eight total books would take us right up to around his sixth! But children are fickle folk (we have seemingly abandoned this twice before, as we took big breaks in the middle of Emerald City and Sky Island), and I try to not be too invested in the idea that this will just keep going.
Next up in sequence: The Enchanted Island of Yew
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