Reading Speedy in Oz Aloud to My Son

Speedy in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

There's a game you can play when you read a Ruth Plumly Thompson Oz novel: which L. Frank Baum book did she reread before writing it? In some cases this is very obvious: she must have reread The Marvelous Land of Oz before writing Lost King and Patchwork Girl before writing Ojo in Oz. In other cases, it's not so obvious but you can make a good argument for it: some small details in Pirates in Oz, for example, make it seem as though Thompson had recently reread Rinkitink in Oz.

Originally published: 1934
Acquired: April 2023
Read aloud: May–June 2023

Along those lines, I would like to suggest that before writing Speedy in Oz, Thompson must have read not an Oz book, but one by L. Frank Baum nonetheless: Sky Island. The obvious link is that both novels largely take place on floating islands. But I would argue it goes beyond this: Speedy in Oz does something that I think is unique in the annals of Thompson's Oz novels, and almost unique in terms of Oz stories more broadly... it all takes place in a single location! This is a Thompson novel without a single "irrelevant enclave"; like Sky Island, the novel is about our protagonists being in a particular place and needing to solve the problems of that place in order to solve their own problems. I don't think there's any other Oz novel like it, though I can think of some that come close, albeit none of them by Thompson (e.g., Ozma of Oz, Scarecrow of Oz, Glinda of Oz).

But let's set the stage. Speedy in Oz (which surely ought to have been called something like The Umbrella Island of Oz, let's be honest) brings back Speedy, the boy protagonist from Yellow Knight, who my four-year-old son did not even remember even though we read it only six months / four books ago, but that didn't really matter. Speedy comes across a dinosaur skeleton in Yellowstone, which has been excavated by a paleontologist. Speedy and his inventor uncle reassemble it... right on top of a geyser! When the geyser erupts, Speedy and the skeleton are thrown into the air, and the force of the blast fuses the bones of the skeleton back together... and grants it life!? They fly through the air for hours before finally landing on Umbrella Island. My wife was listening as I read this bit aloud and she expressed her disbelief. There's no explanation given as to why something seemingly magical would take place, and indeed, later the characters seem fairly certain that if the dinosaur (who gets named Terrybubble) returned to America, its life would cease again. I think by this point Thompson had kind of given up on putting thought into how people got to Oz; to write an Oz book, you have to get some young American there fairly promptly and your audience knows and expects that, so why waste time explaining it too much? And you've got to have some kind of living animal or other grotesque, so why put too much work into explaining that either? (It hangs better together than in Giant Horse, where a living statue in America falls through the ground and somehow ends up in the Munchkin country.)

Umbrella Island, however, has been having problem. Asleep at the wheel, King Sizzeroo crashed it into the giant Loxo the Lucky, and Loxo has demanded Sizzeroo's daughter (who he thinks is a boy), the princess Gureeda (as in "go read a book," since that's all she does), in recompense; the island has six months to cough her up, and Loxo has a magic magnet that can pull the island back to him no matter where it flees. But when Speedy lands on the island, one of Sizzeroo's advisors notices that if dressed in similar clothes, Speedy could pass for Gureeda... so why not convince him to live on the island and hand him over instead? So Speedy and Terrybubble begin to integrate themselves into life on the island but there's this undercurrent of threat in the background.

It all works brilliantly, I would say. Thompson loves her small kingdoms with childlike rulers and comedy advisors (sometimes good and sometimes evil; see Pumperdink, Mudge, Ragbad, Kimbaloo, Rash, Patch, and many many more), but setting a whole novel in the same one lets her flesh out its dimensions and characters, none is wholly good or wholly bad, and certainly my son was able to keep track of the various advisors for one of the first times (with the occasional nudge). Terrybubble is a great animal character; he's a giant dinosaur skeleton... but all he wants to be is Speedy's loyal dog! There's some good problem-solving, something Thompson sometimes neglects in her novels; here, Umbrella Island crash-lands in the Nonestic Ocean and the steering mechanism seizes up... with Umbrella Island stuck right between the warring islands of Roaraway and Norroway. So it's up to Speedy to come up with a way to save the island, not knowing that even if he does, the islanders will do him in. Pansy the Watchcat is another of Thompson's fun rhyming animal characters. (Shades of Sky Island's rhyming parrot, actually!) There's even an undercurrent of romance to the whole thing, as Speedy is falling for Gureeda, but also frustrated with her bookish ways.

In the end, Terrybubble overhears the king and his advisor discussing the plan, and steals away with Speedy and Gureeda in the night, only to inadvertently land right on Big Enough Mountain, home of Loxo. My one complaint is that Speedy plays little role in the climax of the book bearing his name, but maybe his moment of heroism with Roarway is enough to counteract that.

The whole thing has a very different tone and feel to other Thompson novels, and both me and my son really enjoyed it. In fact, it was Thompson's favorite of her own books; I think my favorite is probably still Kabumpo, but this would come in second.

Certainly our enjoyment was enhanced by the edition we read being an International Wizard of Oz Club facsimile of the original Reilly & Lee; this was far better than the SeaWolfs and Del Reys we've been reading for most Thompson. Excellent color plates as always from John R. Neill, and when reproduced at proper size, his black-and-white illustrations add so much liveliness to the world of the text. My son was so happy to have color pictures for the first time in a long while, and we spent a bit of time flipping back and forth through them. The Oz Club is out of copies of Speedy, but I found it pretty easy to get a reasonably priced used copy on the secondary market. Alas, I think we have just one Oz book with color pictures to go (the Oz Club's edition of Wishing Horse), because starting with Captain Salt, the originals were black and white to begin with.

It ends on a melancholy note: Speedy would be welcome to stay on Umbrella Island, but feels he has to return home to hand over the schematics of Roaraway's water gun to his inventor uncle. It is, after all, 1934 and there is a war coming. If I've got my sums right, Speedy would be about eighteen when war actually does break out (for America, anyway) in 1941 and thus eligible to join the Navy as he desires here. I understand there's an Oziana short story about Speedy returning to Umbrella Island, but I find myself curious about what kind of adventures he might have had in the real world as an adult.

But, the narrator tells us that Umbrella Island flies into the outside world sometimes, Terrybubble leaning over the edge to see if he can find Speedy once again, rope ladder lowered so he can climb aboard. It's a bit sad to imagine Terrybubble forever pining for his lost master, but the narrator says probably Speedy will return and become king one day. However, the narrator says that if you see the island float over your house one night, then you should climb right up the rope ladder. 

"Dad!" my son exclaimed upon hearing this, "Oz is real!"

And indeed, in Speedy, it really does feel like it is.

Next up in sequence: The Wishing Horse of Oz