Reading Yankee in Oz Aloud to My Kid

Yankee in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson
illustrated by Dick Martin

In, I believe, the late 1950s, Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote an Oz book and offered it to Reilly & Lee (this would have been after Hidden Valley, before Merry Go Round), but they were uninterested. Over a decade later, the International Wizard of Oz Club offered to publish her manuscript (with permission from the official publisher) with illustrations by Dick Martin, making it the first of their so-called "quasi-canonical" Oz books. My kid and I read it after Merry Go Round, when it was finally published.

Originally published: 1973
Acquired: July 2024
Read aloud: July–August 2024

Before this, Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote nineteen Oz books, and I have read enough of them to know exactly what to expect. Thomas P. Terry, better known as "Tompy" is a band kid and football player swept by a hurricane right out of a Labor Day parade into Oz; there he meets Yankee, a test dog for a NASA moon orbit whose capsule crash-landed in Oz as well. As is pretty typical, Thompson devotes little time to justifying the adventure and just kind of gets on with it. Thompson always does well by animals, and the charming relationship between Tompy and Yankee, who quickly become devoted to each other, is the real highlight of the book. This lacks the frantic pacing of  some of her books; Tompy and Yankee travel from place to place and meet interesting people. The idea of people you can make by just adding water to a powder is a great Ozzy visual, and I really enjoyed the tone of the section about the Lanternese, who have paper lanterns for heads (and thus cannot speak).

Like a lot of Thompson books, there's also the ingredients for an interesting quest she doesn't quite deliver on. Tompy and Yankee are asked by the people of Wackajammy to rescue their lost princess, but they selfishly refuse. In a book by a different author, you might expect this would be a set-up for a moral lesson to the protagonists... but not so here! They refuse to be helpful, and accidentally bump into her and rescue her and are lauded as heroes for it. Wow. They do both get some good heroic moments, though, taking down the giant Badmannah, who has been kidnapping princesses for his cave. (On the other hand, there are two separate occasions where Tompy bangs his drumsticks on something for no reason and that ends up coincidentally being exactly what was needed to be done.) Badmannah escalates up to kidnapping an oddly powerless and resourceless Ozma (well, par for the course for Thompson, again), and Jinnicky, Tompy, and Yankee manage to save her. Sometimes Thompson protagonists contribute nothing, while convenient magicians show up, and there is a bit of that with Jinnicky the Red Jinn, but both characters have their own pivotal moments.

There's also a prophecy that seems like it should be important but goes nowhere, and Tompy and Yankee acquire a book that lets them read minds... which they never use to do anything significant! The careful plotting of Merry Go Round in Oz this is not; like a lot of Thompson's books, it reads like a first draft.

If she gets away with it, it's because of the aforementioned relationship between Yankee and Tompy. Unusually, the book has a whole chapter set back in America at the end. There's a real sense of sadness as it seems like they will have to give up their relationship because Yankee can't speak outside of Oz. This comes all right, of course, but I think my six-year-old was a bit tense, judging by how delighted he was when it all worked out. And there's a very fun bit where Tompy actually goes to a bookstore to buy a copy of Purple Prince to read to Yankee so he can know more about their friend Jinnicky. We've had a few Oz protagonists who have read Oz books, but this is the most specific reference thus far.

Dick Martin's illustrations are largely sparse and boring; whole chapters go by with no pictures, and lots are simple little images of Yankee. There are neat visuals and key characters that go wholly unillustrated. I guess he did it for free, but still.

Not one of Thompson's best, but not one of her worst, either. Pleasant but undemanding, which is sometimes what you want out of a trip to Oz, after all.

I bought print-on-demand copies of this book and Forbidden Fountain from Lulu, where they have been put by the Oz Club. The original 1970s edition was oversized, with lots of text on big pages; this was a hardcover at the same size as all the other Oz books. It had an unfortunate number of typos, though; very distracting. Picking up these two books finished off my collection of "quasi-canonical" novels, which you can see to the right. Lining them up, I was appreciative that Eric Shanower maintained a consistent visual design for the three he illustrated... even though they were released by three different publishers!

Next up in sequence: The Enchanted Island of Oz