Reading The Wicked Witch of Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Wicked Witch of Oz by Rachel Cosgrove Payes
illustrated by Eric Shanower

Like many Oz fans, I suppose, my kid likes how the books lend themselves to indexing and organizing. Four quadrants of Oz, each with its own color, and each with its own ruler. Each also has its own wicked witch... well, almost. In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, the Wizard stated that when he arrived in Oz, each quadrant was ruled by its own witch, good ones in the north and south, and wicked ones in the east and west, but Ozma told him that before that, the north and south had been ruled by wicked witches as well. The Wicked Witches of the East and West we of course met (and disposed of) back in the very first book, and the Wicked Witch of the North, Mombi, appeared in Marvelous Land. But who was the Wicked Witch of the South, and what was her story? My kid has long asked me this question—and from our looking at covers of future Oz books, has long known we would someday find the answer to that question in The Wicked Witch of Oz.

Published: 1993
Acquired: June 2024
Read aloud: June–July 2024

The story goes that after writing Hidden Valley, Rachel Cosgrove offered Reilly & Lee a second Oz book, called Percy in Oz. But Reilly & Lee passed on the book, and the manuscript sat in Cosgrove's trunk for forty years (by which point she had married and was known as Rachel Cosgrove Payes*) until it was published by the International Wizard of Oz Club with illustrations by Eric Shanower under the title The Wicked Witch of Oz. As is my usual method on my journey through Oz with my kid, we read it where it would have been published, not where it was, my reasoning being they were far more likely to remember and care about relevant characters in this sequence. (This does create a minor discontinuity, in that a character from Merry Go Round in Oz, which we haven't read yet, appears in a crowd scene.)

The story, like many of Baum's own, is tantalizing but light on backstory. It begins with Singra, the Wicked Witch of the South, awaking from a hundred-year sleep in her hut in the Red Forest of the Quadling Country. We are told Glinda put her to sleep (consistent with the statement in Dorothy and the Wizard that "Glinda the Good had conquered the evil Witch in the South") but given little beyond this. How did Glinda do this? Why put her to sleep (and then, apparently, forget about her)? What kind of terror did Singra get up to? We are not told, because the story much more focuses on the present-day machinations of Singra, though it does give us the tantalizing bit of information that Singra is cousin to the Wicked Witches of the East and West—our first indication in the Oz novels, in fact, that they were related to each other. (The 1939 film made them sisters.) The book does seem to indicate Singra did not rule the Quadling country previously, when she thinks about how nice it would be to rule it.

Singra is a protagonist here; many of the book's chapters follow her decisions and actions. On waking up, she learns that while she was a sleep a girl named Dorothy killed her cousins, so she plots her revenge: turning Dorothy into a piece of cheese! This requires stealing some ingredients from Glinda's palace and even capturing the Scarecrow, but things go wrong for her when she accidentally transforms Trot, thinking her Dorothy. Dorothy and Percy the White Rat (from Hidden Valley) immediately set out in pursuit of Singra, and have various adventures, meeting a "rubber band" (i.e., a band whose members are made of rubber), making friends with a living neon light named Leon, getting captured by giant bees, and being partially transformed into hummingbirds before finally catching up with Singra... who then turns Dorothy into a statue!

My kid repeatedly indicated they found the book scary and that they didn't like it. They have never like reading about "bad things" happening, and Wicked Witch has more of those than most Oz books: Singra stealing things, Singra tying up the Scarecrow and taking some of his straw, Singra transforming Trot, Singra transforming Dorothy. I think to an adult reader, it doesn't come across as terribly perilous, but it totally works for a five-year-old. (Even though at one point they told me they were pretty sure Dorothy would not be a piece of cheese in later Oz books.) It did, I suspect, keep them involved in the book—for the past year or so, we've averaged one Oz book per month (compared to our earlier rate of twenty-three in one year), but we flew through this one in just a couple weeks because they kept on asking for chapters (whereas normally we just read a chapter on the alternate days that I do bedtime). How would Dorothy be saved?

Though it has the problems in the ending of many Oz books (once Ozma knows what's going on, the book wraps up pretty quickly, because there's little Ozma can't do with the Magic Belt, the Magic Picture, and the Wizard to call upon), I too enjoyed it a lot. I do like it when "wicked" characters are co-protagonists in Oz books (e.g., Lost King, Pirates) because they are often sly and clever, and it's interesting to kind of root both for and against them. The book is much more focused than Cosgrove's Hidden Valley, with a smaller cast of characters: just Percy, Dorothy, and later Leon in the adventuring party. This means the characters all get to contribute (unlike the extraneous Cowardly Lion and Hungry Tiger in Hidden Valley), and Dorothy comes across as the forthright protagonist we're used to from previous books. The communities they bump into on their journey are interesting without being distracting, and like in Hidden Valley, Cosgrove is good about the characters using their cleverness to get out of situations. The incidents feel Baumian without feeling derivative; the partial forced transformation into hummingbirds, for example, recalls Road to Oz, and Leon the Neon is a great idea.

I think it's probably also impossible to understate what a difference good illustrations make to an Oz book, and Wicked Witch is blessed with ones by Eric Shanower, surely the best Oz illustrator other than Denslow and Neill. His illustrations are detailed but also whimsical, capturing the imagery of the text in an evocative way: I loved his pictures of Leon the Neon, for example, and Percy and Dorothy with hummingbird wings is an amazing visual. (Sure this is the only official Oz novel to show us Dorothy's belly button!) There's a good sense of humor to the images too; my kid and I both loved his pictures of the cheese-obsessed Percy. And the pictures aren't just there in quality, but also quantity: each chapter has a title page with a small picture, whereas the first page of each chapter has a big image that wraps around the text, spanning two pages. (J. L. Bell has a great discussion of the book's visual design here.) Indeed, there's no two-page spread of the book that is image-less; again, compare with Hidden Valley, where my three-year-old (who will read Oz with us a bedtime) would look at a two-page spread of pure text and complain, "I want to see a picture!" Crazy to think that Shanower offered to reillustrate Hidden Valley when the Oz Club republished it, and they turned him down!

Other Thoughts:

• For the first time, I think, my kid actually got a punny creation in an Oz book: they understood both meanings of "rubber band" here, being familiar both with actual rubber bands and getting what it meant to have a band made out of rubber. They boggled a bit.
  
• There is a very rare post-Neill reference to Ruth Plumly Thompson's books here, with the Wizard's searchlight (from Yellow Knight and Ojo) being mentioned, though not used, as a way to find the missing Trot.
  

Next up in sequence: Merry Go Round in Oz

* While Hidden Valley was her first ever book, by 1993 she had published numerous novels, most of them romances with titles like Love's Escapade, Bride of Fury, Moment of Desire, and Satan's Mistress. Not exactly Oz material!