The Shaggy Man of Oz by Jack Snow
illustrated by Frank Kramer
There are some who praise Jack Snow as a writer for his more Baumian vibe, preferring him to Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neill. I don't remember his books at all, though I know I read them when I was a kid; I got them from the library so I only read them the once. When I found my spreadsheet of Oz books from when I was twelve, I rated both of Snow's books 10/10, so clearly I myself was among those who enjoyed them. But reading them as an adult, it's less that Snow has a Baumiam vibe and more that he just rips L. Frank Baum off... while not really capturing what made Baum successful to begin with.
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| Originally published: 1949 Acquired: July 2022 Read aloud: April–May 2024 |
It is pretty clear that to write The Shaggy Man of Oz, Snow must have reread Road to Oz, Emerald City, and John Dough and the Cherub. Road because Shaggy Man features the Shaggy Man, and that book was the character's introduction; Shaggy Man even, in a classic fanboy move, explains a seeming inconsistency between Rod and Tik-Tok of Oz when it comes to the powers of the Love Magnet. But in a different kind of classic fanboy move, Snow can read the text closely enough to reconcile a minor discrepancy but not close enough to get the actual point of the text! In Road, Shaggy initially tells Dorothy that he got the Love Magnet from an Eskimo who gave it to him... but at the end of the book, he admits he actually stole it from a young woman because he felt unloved. If Snow reread Road to write Shaggy Man, he evidently didn't make it all the way to the end, because he presents the original story of the Love Magnet as fact here.
To me, this totally misses the point of not just the Love Magnet, but the Shaggy Man as a character. He's a man who was unloved but came to be loved, and then learned he didn't need this artificial tool to be loved. It's a very common trope for Baum. But there's no hint of that characterization here; in Snow's hands, Shaggy is just a somewhat genial blank slate. There's a weird bit where the Shaggy Man and his young companions, Twink and Tom, supposedly teach a group of people the true meaning of love... but they do so via the Love Magnet, which doesn't create real love at all! I mean, I guess it's very L. Frank Baum in that the book called Shaggy Man of Oz seems very disinterested in the actual Shaggy Man (see also: Tik-Tok of Oz, Scarecrow of Oz), but it's frustrating. Thompson ignored the Shaggy Man throughout her run on Oz, but despite sticking him the title, Jack Snow might as well be ignoring him too.
We read John Dough and the Cherub immediately prior to Shaggy Man because they have a side character in common, the King of the Fairy Beavers. What this revealed to me, though, was that Snow was basically totally ripping off John Dough. In John Dough, John Dough and the Cherub escape an island via a flying car they steal; in Shaggy Man, Shaggy and his young friends escape an island via a flying car they steal. In John Dough, the characters travel to Hiland; in Shaggy Man, the characters travel to Hightown. (Though Highland is nothing like Hiland; Snow uses the name as a jumping off point but that's it.) In John Dough, the characters are trapped in the Palace of Romance whose inhabitants never stop telling stories; in Shaggy Man, the characters are trapped in the Valley of Romance whose inhabitants never stop watching plays. In John Dough, the King of the Fairy Beavers pops up and solves all the main characters' problems; in Shaggy Man, the King of the Fairy Beavers pops up and solves all the main characters' problems.
My five-year-old seemed to largely enjoy the ways the books coincided; they clearly expected Hightown and Hiland to be the same things, and the Valley of Romance and the Palace of Romance to be so as well, but they soon got over it. To me, though, it was frustrating. Like, I just read this book! And like in Magical Mimics, the supposed main characters contribute little to the resolution of any of their difficulties. The Shaggy Man and his young friends only do one clever thing, using the Love Magnet in the Valley of Romance; it's the King of the Fairy Beavers who figures out a way to cross the Deadly Desert, to breach the Barrier of Invisibility, to defeat Conjo the mischievous wizard who wants to take over as the Wizard of Oz.
Lastly, Snow clearly reread Emerald City because the characters use the Nome King's tunnel from that book... and the King of the Fairy Beavers defeats Conjo the exact same way Ozma defeated the Nome King in Emerald City. It's boring and anticlimactic.
I already complained about the Shaggy Man; on top of that, Twink and Tom are surely the least interesting "American kids whisked to Oz" in all the Famous Forty, below even Zeb. I don't think they did anything striking in the entire book. Bring back Peter and Bob Up!
My five-year-old said they enjoyed it... though I also think they got a lot less excited about it than some other Oz books we've read of late. I also don't like that Snow has many short chapters, as opposed to Baum and Thompson's somewhat fewer but longer ones. If you do one chapter aloud at a time, it means you move through it somewhat slowly, and very little seems to happen. Boy did it drag.
But that's it for Jack Snow, who made just two contributions to the Famous Forty. Next we get someone new again!
Next up in sequence: The Hidden Valley of Oz
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