My six-year-old and I are rapidly running out of "quasi-canonical" Oz books. Unlike previous books published by the International Wizard of Oz Club, The Hidden Prince of Oz has no connection to any Royal Historian; rather, the Oz Club ran a competition to find a book manuscript to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
The Hidden Prince of Oz by Gina Wickwar |
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| Published: 2000 Acquired: May 2024 Read aloud: October–December 2024 |
This is probably the reason for a (pretty minor) bit of backstory about the Wicked Witch of the East and the Tin Woodman; the novel takes place one hundred and one years exactly after she passed away. Aside from that, though, Hidden Prince reads much more like a Ruth Plumly Thompson pastiche than a Baum one: we have a small kingdom with comedy advisors, an orphan propelled to Oz in somewhat contrived circumstances, a nonhuman character who turns out to be another character under an enchantment, and a climax that features a wedding (various examples of these tropes: Kabumpo, Grampa, Giant Horse, Yellow Knight). As a Thompson fan, I don't mind this... but I found this book to be a drag.
The fundamentals are good. In one subplot, the illegal magician Zeebo disappears, and his two faithful pets, the parrot Beak and the teacup poodle Penny (complete with magical teacup, of course) must set out to rescue him; in the other, the American orphan Emma-Lou winds up in the Oz kingdom of Silica along with a living wooden Indian from the porch of an Arizona trading post. Two small animals against the fearful world seems like fertile ground for an Oz plot; I really like Oz books where seeming underdogs go on dangerous quests and prove themselves (e.g., Wonderful Wizard, Patchwork Girl, Kabumpo, Merry Go Round). But Penny and Beak quickly get lost in a slew of characters that join their quest; Ketzal the feathered boa is a fun idea, but there's also a completely pointless bit about a leperchaun. In the other plotline, you barely get to know Emma-Lou and Chief Thundercloud because they're joined by Bungle the Glass Cat, Princess Vitria of Silica, and her cousin Vitrix. More and more characters are piled on, until by the end of the novel we also have the Tin Woodman, the Wizard (though he leaves before the climax), Smithereens the third assistant glassworks keeper, Venté the passenger pigeon, Polychrome the Rainbow's Daughter, and the Saw-Horse. And I think I am probably forgetting someone else! Any one of the added characters are fine on their own, there's just not enough space for them here. Wickwar should have saved them for another book!
None of the characters gets the space to do anything interesting or clever or memorable, and it seems like in many cases they just get a line of dialogue or bit of action per chapter so you don't forget about them... but that often seems outside their scope or personalities. (Penny and Venté, for example, carry bags of gold, which seems unlike for two characters with no hands!) The cores of the book (in my opinion) ought to have been 1) Penny and Beak's devotion to their master, who frankly doesn't deserve it, and 2) Emma-Lou's finding of a place in the world, probably with Thundercloud. The two animals should have stayed on their own; Emma-Lou and Thundercloud should have gone on their quest with just Bungle at most. But these things are buried under a piling-on on incident and characters, and Emma-Lou weirdly ends up adopted by Zeebo, a character 1) she only just met, and 2) who has displayed nothing but dubious moral character the entire novel! She should have become a princess with Cyan and Vitrea! And why does Vitrea have to give up her kingdom for a man, anyway?
Anna-Maria Cool illustrates, and proves herself a solid mid-tier Oz artist. She's no John R. Neill or Eric Shanower... but then, who is? She's good at bringing characters to life in particular; her faces have a real liveliness to them that really helps with the book's storytelling.
On top of all this, I don't think the book is longer by word count than a typical Oz book, but it's got thirty chapters instead of the usual twenty-something; this means that if you read a chapter aloud on alternate nights (as I do), the book does seem to drag on, taking over a month to get through. (Reading it back to back with Ozmapolitan revealed that I use the same voice for Eurkea and Bungle, a sort of "southern belle" accent. I guess it just seems right for cats.)
All that said, though, when I asked my six-year-old if they liked it, they said yes, and when I asked what, they said, "All of it." I think they particularly liked the unusual characters like Penny and Ketzal, so it's a shame they didn't have more to do.
Next up in sequence: Toto of Oz
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