The Purple Prince of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill
After some Oz books my son and I seemed to move through more slowly, this one we finished in just over a month. I attribute this to its clearer narrative focus—clearer in the sense it's more readily glommed onto by a four-year-old—and strong set of protagonists, especially Kabumpo.
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| Originally published: 1932 Acquired: February 2023 Read aloud: February–March 2023 |
This book is a sequel to Thompson's Kabumpo in Oz: at the end of that book, Prince Pompadore of Pumperdink married Princess Peg Amy of Sun Top Mountain. This one opens with them happily living in Pumperdink with their daughter, Princess Pajonia, and Pompa's parents, the king and queen of Pumperdink, when a young Gillikin mountain boy named Randy comes to court, and is adopted by Kabumpo, the Elegant Elephant of Oz, as his attendant. Most of the characters from Kabumpo, however, don't really factor into this, as in short order the entire Royal Family of Pumperdink is enchanted in a plot by Kettywig, the king's brother, and Faleero, the evil fairy princess of Follensby Forest. So Kabumpo and Randy set off on a quest to disenchant the Royal Family.
Kabumpo is Thompson's greatest addition to the pantheon of Oz characters, and this book shows why. The Elegant Elephant is loyal and intelligent, but also stubborn and conceited, which makes him always fun to read about, and always interesting. Like Baum's best characters, he has attributes that sometimes are the key to solving problems, and sometimes lead to problems. Randy is a bit of a generic Thompson protagonist, but he's fine enough. Together, the two of them do that typical Thompson thing of moving from weird place to weird place before they finally end up in Ev and meet Jinnicky the Red Jinn, who was a minor character in Jack Pumpkinhead, but here ends up joining them on their quest to stop Faleero. The Jinn doesn't take much seriously, which makes him a good contrast to the overly serious Kabumpo.
Like the best Oz books, we have an adventuring party of mixed personalities with a clear goal. So even though much of what the characters do along the way is pretty incidental, and there's not as much clever problem-solving as in, say, Jack Pumpkinhead, it's hard not to enjoy the ride. Both me and my son were carried through it pretty well, and had a good time. As it often is for Thompson, the ending is more down to coincidence than cleverness, but whatever.
About halfway through the book, we have an interlude in the Gillikin mountain kingdom of Regalia, where we learn their young prince is on a quest to prove himself worthy of being king. Which character could be this eponymous purple prince??? Hilariously, my son had no guesses at all in this novel with literally only one possible candidate, and by the time it was revealed, he had forgotten all about that interlude anyway. But Randy is actually Prince Randywell Handywell Brandenburg Bompadoo of Regalia, and becomes King of Regalia following his fulfillment of the quest; he'll turn up again (with more Kabumpo and Jinnicky, I think) in The Silver Princess in Oz.
As I have said before, I owned all the Baum books as a kid and a few Books of Wonder Thompsons; the rest of the Thompsons I got through interlibrary loan on 1990s dial-up thanks to my mother and the public library system of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. I don't know which ones I actually got and read, because nothing from any Thompson novel thus far has struck any kind of chord of familiarity.
But I do know I read Purple Prince, because this was the one Thompson Oz novel owned by the Cincinnati library system. This meant I couldn't ILL it... but the problem was that it was in the noncirculating collection at the downtown library, so I couldn't check it out either. (It would have been, after all, a valuable sixty-year-old book by that point.) My very indulgent family thus went on a trip to the downtown library, where I parked myself in a chair for a couple hours and read the whole book in one go! I am not sure how they entertained themselves. So I know for a fact that I read this one as a kid... but still I remembered nothing of it before cracking it open to read it to my son.
Next up in sequence: Ojo in Oz
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