Reading The Silver Princess in Oz Aloud to My Son

The Silver Princess in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

My son and I have come to Thompson's penultimate Oz novel in the "Famous Forty"; like many of her late novels, you get the sense that she's just doing whatever interests her. This, like Captain Salt in Oz, features no Baum characters. Sometimes fans complain about this, but I don't really buy the grounds for complaint. At this point, Thompson has written seventeen previous Oz novels—three more than Baum. Why should her characters be seen as less valid than his?

Originally published: 1938
Acquired: ~1996?
Read aloud: August 2023

The preexisting characters here are Kabumpo and Prince Randy. This is Kabumpo's fourth major appearance I think, and he's definitely a favorite in this household. Randy recurs from Purple Prince, though my son didn't seem to remember him very much even though it was only six months ago. I guess he is a fairly generic character. The two head out to visit their friend Jinnicky the Red Jinn of Ev and get into various escapades on the way, most notably encountering and befriending Princess Planetty, from Anuther Planet, and her Thunder Colt, Thun. That's right—the co-protagonist (and Randy's eventual love interest) is an alien! Fairly topical in the era of Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds, I suppose. The four make a good team; my son was in particular tickled by the various powers and peculiarities of Thun. Thompson always does well by horse characters (well, except for the OG Oz horse character). (To make it clear that "Anuther" was a proper noun and not just "another," I gave it a long u: "uh-NOO-ther." This seems unlikely to have been Thompson's intention, but I liked it better.)

Like most Thompson books the characters make their way through various weird enclaves, and then have to put a rightful ruler back on the throne. I felt the weird enclaves were a cut above average here, not like the forgettable ones of Purple Prince. I loved the idea of the Gapers, who concenrate all their sleeping into half the year, and then spend the other half of the year stretching out three long meals. I particularly enjoyed the Box Wood of Ix (the only appearance of Ix in a Famous Forty novel, fact fans), whose inhabitants live in boxes: after all, when you take something out of a box, it wears out or goes bad or breaks down, so if you never want to wear out or go bad or break down, stay in a box! It has a wonderful weird logic to it, like the best of the weird creatures of Oz. (If you are playing the "what Baum novel was Thompson slightly recycling" game, the answer this time is Patchwork Girl: like in that book, the main characters must burn their way through a tall fence which has a boxy creature inside it.)

When the characters actually get to Ev, it all goes a bit downhill. It turns out that Jinnicky has been usurped by one Gludwig the Glubrious... and so our heroes have to put down a slave rebellion! It's been a recurrent thing since Jinnicky was introduced back in Jack Pumpkinhead that he has "blacks" who work for him, who are sometimes called slaves. Following a suggestion I read somewhere online, I have been turning them into rock creatures who are Jinnicky's servants. As is so often the case, Thompson's racial politics are disturbingly regressive. Like how can someone in the 1930s think it's okay to write a book where the heroes put down a slave rebellion of black people? The slaves who rose up are in the wrong, Jinnicky the supposedly kind-hearted master is in the right. So I did a lot of amending here; I made them into servants formed of rock, like I said, and then when Jinnicky is restored, he agrees to better pay and working conditions for his servants.

Like in too many Thompson novels, it's a dull climax anyway. Randy just happens to free Ginger, the servant of Jinnicky's magic dinner bell; at the exact same time, Jinnicky just happens to be fished up from where Gludwig dumped him in the ocean; at the moment Jinnicky rings the bell, Randy, Ginger, Kabumpo, and Planetty just happen to be touching so they all get carried to where he is. Jinnicky then just magics them all back to Ev and defeats Gludwig in a second. It doesn't require our protagonists to do anything interesting or clever. (As is too often the case, Randy just happens to have picked up a magic tool earlier that protects him from harm.) I feel like almost every Thompson novel could go from good to great with a rewritten climax, though this one would need a pretty substantial rewrite.

I did like Nonagon Isle, the nine-sided island of misanthropic fishermen where Jinnicky washes up, that was fun. (And the existence of it and Octagon Isle taken together thus implies a whole set of polyhedral island in the Nonestic.)

In her introductory note, Thompson says of Gludwig, "With a name like that, we'd know he was a villain, wouldn't we?" And indeed (maybe because of that) my five-year-old insisted he didn't like it when anyone said "Gludwig the Glubrious." He was okay with it in the story, but if I would go "Gludwig the Glubrious" in any other context (and it's a fun name to say), he would scream, "I don't like that name! Stop!" He Who Must Not Be Named! The two-year-old is usually there when we read Oz these days, though he doesn't really follow it yet, and he was thus happy to start going "Gludwig the Glubrious Gludwig the Glubrious Gludwig the Glubrious" again and again much to the consternation of his brother.

Next up in sequence: Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz