Reading The Enchanted Island of Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Enchanted Island of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson
illustrated by Dick Martin

After the success of Yankee in Oz, the Oz Club asked Ruth Plumly Thompson if she had any more manuscripts—and she did, an unpublished fantasy novel about a boy and his camel who go Somewhere. So Thompson rewrote it a little bit to take place in Oz, and the Club published it in 1976.

Originally published: 1976
Acquired: December 2023
Read aloud: August–September 2024

If Yankee was somewhat generic Thompson adventure but fun enough to get away with it, Enchanted Island is a somewhat generic Thompson adventure but largely not fun enough to get away with it. I liked Humpty the Camel well enough, and some of the stuff about Kapurta, the "enchanted island" of the title, is pretty fun, but aside from that, there wasn't much to this. David and Humpty go from place to place, go away, and so on. There's little cleverness, little sense of adventure. Like in a lot of Thompsons, everything is pretty much solved accidentally and with little input from our protagonists; ideas that are set up in the beginning (such as Humpty's longing for the king he was torn away from) are never returned to. There weren't a lot of pictures in Dick Martin's Yankee, but it seems to me that here there are even fewer ones. It's perfectly serviceable as an Oz book, and very quick, but you've read a lot of it before.

Despite that, I found myself wanting a sequel. There's a lot of interesting elements here that could make a great story; I'd love to see David return to Kapurta to be reunited with Humpty and King Rupert and go on some kind of quest involving the magic wishing buttons.

Still, my six-year-old seemed decently into it... but I'd also guess that a week after we finished it, they'd struggle to tell you much about it. Although, they were very much delighted by all the magic party shenanigans in the last chapter involving the birthday button! (I edited out the claim that the Cowardly Lion liked and would adopt the name "Cowy"; c'mon now, no way.)

Next up in sequence: The Forbidden Fountain of Oz