The Hidden Valley of Oz by Rachel R. Cosgrove
illustrated by Dirk
The Hidden Valley of Oz is a landmark book for me: though not the last book in the "Famous Forty" (there is one more to go), it is the last that I had not read before, as I owned the fortieth and final one, Merry Go Round in Oz, when I was a kid. So my reading it aloud to my five-year-old kid was the first time I had ever read it, and the last time I will ever discover a new "canonical" Oz novel.
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| Originally published: 1951 Acquired: July 2022 Read aloud: May–June 2024 |
Like Jack Snow, it seems like Rachel Cosgrove was very consciously aping L. Frank Baum in her contribution to the Famous Forty; more specifically, she was definitely aping The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In Wonderful Wizard, an American child is whisked through the air to Oz where grateful locals think they are a witch or wizard and send them on a quest for a distant ruler with animal companions in tow. In Hidden Valley, an American child is whisked through the air to Oz where grateful locals think they are a witch or wizard and send them on a quest for a distant ruler with animal companions in tow. While the Munchkins were grateful to Dorothy for killing the Wicked Witch of the East and send her off to see the Wizard of Oz, Jonathan "Jam" Manley lands in the Gillikin country. He doesn't kill anyone for the Gillikins, but they send Jam off to find the Emperor of the Winkies, because they believe his axe is the key to liberating them from the tyranny of a giant named Terp the Terrible.
This "back to basics" approach also manifests in who Jam meets, and how the story is told. When Jam meets the Emperor of the Winkies, he is of course the Tin Woodman, and they are joined on their journey by Dorothy and the Scarecrow (plus also the Hungry Tiger). So we get a classic formula for an Oz story, told with a set of classic characters. The way it is told is also very Baum: unlike in a Ruth Plumly Thompson or John R. Neill novel, where the characters plunge from encounter to encounter, for the first time in a long while, we have an Oz story where they amble from encounter to encounter, slowly walking from point A to point B and back again, encountering various obstacles on the way. And like in one of Baum's better novels (e.g., Dorothy and the Wizard, Patchwork Girl), those encounters are ones that require clever thinking on the part of our protagonists to escape danger. That said, the dangers are very Thompsonian: two of the three irrelevant enclaves that Jam and company meet are ones that want to convert the protagonists into their own weird way of living (as books and snowmen). The original animal characters here, Percy the White Rat and the Leopard with Changing Spots especially, are fun additions.
So far so good. But I found the book weak in a couple key areas. One is that there are simply too many characters in the adventuring party: across the course of the book we have Jam, Percy, Pinny and Gig (two guinea pigs), Jam's sentient kite, Dorothy, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, Spots, and the Rhyming Dictionary. Though there's no point where all eleven characters are in the party at once, Cosgrove clearly struggles to give them all something to do, and twice resorts to characters just leaving the group for sort of flimsy reasons. And among the ones who don't leave, it's really only Percy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman who consistently contribute; Jam feels like an also-ran in his own book, Dorothy might as well not be there, and the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger are wasted. I like the emphasis on clever problem solving, something sorely missing from many of the recent Oz novels, but it would have been nice for Jam to do something in the book. The climactic fight against Terp seems like the place for that, but it's actually the previously hapless Gillikins who do most of the heavy lifting for some reason! The party comes up with a clever plan, but I wish the party had been the ones to put it into action.
The book is also let down by the illustrations, probably the worst to ever appear in an canonical Oz novel. Sketchy and utterly lacking in whimsy or charm or imagination. And so few of them too! ("The food at this place is really terrible." "Yeah, I know; and such small portions!")
My kid seemed to enjoy it; they were particularly fascinated by the fact that the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman used hypnotism to defeat the monster guarding the magic muffin tree that made Terp the Terrible into a giant. I think they particularly liked the new animal characters. But I don't think it's one they loved either. Which, I think, is a fair assessment. I am hoping Cosgrove's other Oz novel is more involving.
Next up in sequence: The Wicked Witch of Oz
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