Reading Handy Mandy in Oz Aloud to My Son

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

My son has been hyped up for Handy Mandy for a long time, entirely on the basis of its protagonist: a girl with seven arms from a place where everyone has seven arms. Two are skin, one is wood, one is iron, one is leather, and two are rubber, and she uses different hands for different jobs around the house. I liked Mandy (who gets nicknamed "Handy Mandy" upon her arrival in Oz) a lot; she's the kind of somewhat grotesque main character that Baum often went in for (e.g., the Tin Woodman, the Woggle-Bug) but that Thompson has largely eschewed in her own Oz work; moreover, she is Thompson's only original female protagonist, since she usually used Dorothy (plus one outing for Trot and one for Betsy) or an original male character. Mandy is good fun: hardworking and determined, but with an impetuous streak that often gets her into trouble. Her co-protagonist is Nox the Royal Ox, who is essentially cut from the same mold as Kabumpo, but Thompson always does well by her animal characters, so I didn't mind.

Originally published: 1937
Acquired: June 2022
Read aloud: July–August 2023

So Mandy is fun and Nox is fun, but the actual events of the novel made it one of Thompson's more mediocre outings. I have seen Eric Shanower complain that everyone says they like Purple Prince of Oz but no one who says so can actually remember anything about it beyond the main characters, and Handy Mandy has a similar problem. On their quest to find King Kerry, the lost boy kind of the minor Munchkin kingdom of Keretaria, Mandy and Nox encounter nothing of real interest or difficulty, though there is some fun stuff, such as one of Nox's horns turning out to be a "horn of plenty" which can generate whatever kind of stuff you might want in great volume.

Kerry turns out to be in the Silver Mountain, where the Wizard Wutz is collecting magical objects from across Oz prior to a takeover bid. (If I can play the game of "what Baum novel did Thompson reread before writing this one?", it seems to be Lost Princess.) Mandy and Nox luckily have one of those tools, a silver hammer that summons an elf named Himself (who Thompson also calls a dwarf). However, in classic Thompson fashion, the wrapup of the plot depends a lot on coincidence, and the silver hammer is so powerful that the protagonists don't really do anything interesting other than use it repeatedly.

The eventual explanation for all the doings of the magic hammer don't really make any sense, I think. It belonged to Wunchie, a witch of the west who used it to control the rulers of minor Munchkin kingdoms (Thompson always confusing east and west in Oz) up until two years ago. How do Ozma and Glinda not notice things like this!? Moreover, Wunchie used the hammer to depose the king of Keretaria and install Wutz's agent on the throne... but Wutz installed an agent on the throne of Keretaria in order to search the country for the silver hammer! The ending has all the hallmarks of Thompson making something up on the spot that doesn't accord with the details seeded earlier in the novel; surely the silver hammer was meant to be from the Silver Mountain and surely the "W" on it was meant to be for "Wutz," not the introduced-and-disposed-of-off-screen-in-the-literal-last-chapter Wunchie.

Wutz has an army of secret agents across Oz stealing magical artifacts; in addition to the one in Keretaria, we hear that another stole the Great Book of Records from Glinda, and we also see in flashback how another stole the Magic Picture and a jug that used to be Ruggedo (the deposed Nome King) from Ozma's palace. The agents all have numbers, and while reading it dawn on me that the book came out in 1937... and the late 1930s were the heyday of espionage thrillers about sinister agents plotting against England, with films like by Hitchcock and his imitators The 39 Steps, I Was a Spy, The Man Who Knew Too Much, On Secret Service, Sabotage, The Secret Agent, and The W Plan. I never thought I would read an Oz take on Hitchcock, but I think this is one—surely there is a Baum Bugle article in this, but probably better off written by someone who knows more about 1930s spy thrillers than I do! It's a bit weird thinking of Oz books as refract popular films of the time... but I imagine this happens more often than modern readers realize; the pop culture of the past no longer reads as pop culture to use a century on. And Captain Salt was Thompson's take on Kipling, so why not do Hitchcock next?

My son seemed to enjoy it, though. Thompson does lots of fun stuff with Mandy's seven hands that appeals to the imagination of a five-year-old, and when we finished the book he had lots of follow-up questions about the plot. (Not all of which I could answer satisfactorily. What was up with that magic flower?) I think he was a bit nervous when Wutz and Ruggedo stupefied the inhabitants of Ozma's palace and stole the Magic Belt, but later he told me it had no "bad parts." Also Neill provides a number of excellent two-page spreads, which compensates a bit for the loss of the color plates. It looks as good as it could given the constraints he was under by this point.

It is in the public domain, so I wonder if there are any fan follow-ups that take this fun character and put her into a more interesting plot. I have my own ideas...

Next up in sequence: The Silver Princess in Oz