Reading The Emerald Wand of Oz Aloud to My Kid

In 2005, a major publisher released an Oz book, one consistent with the Famous Forty (or, at least, the original fourteen by Baum)—I am pretty sure this was an unprecedented event, as any major post-FF Oz book has been a "noncanonical" take like Wicked or Dorothy Must Die, and any canon-consistent book has been a small-press release from a publisher like Hungry Tiger Press or Books of Wonder or the Oz Club. But through book packager Byron Preiss, HarperCollins obtained the rights to brand their new Oz book as licensed by the Baum Family Trust.

To be honest, it's not totally clear to me what everyone involved got out of this. Everything in Baum's original books is in the public domain now, so what did HarperCollins need from the Baum Family Trust? Was it just a marketing hook? If so, it's hard for me to imagine it was really that much of a draw. The book was written by a legitimate fantasy author, Sherwood Smith, who had written dozens of fantasy novels before Emerald Wand, unlike most canon-consistent post-FF authors, who are Oz fans first and writers second. Two more would follow; the first two were illustrated by William Stout, who I guess is famous but I can't claim to have heard of.

Anyway, I've long been curious about it, so when my six-year-old kid and I finished all the other somewhat "official" Oz books written by Royal Historians and/or released, we continued on to these. The books feel less calibrated for reading aloud, though, than Baum and his imitators; the chapters have no titles, the chapter lengths are variable, and the illustration density is particularly low, not even one per chapter. I think there's a one-hundred-page stretch here with no pictures at all! It seemed to me this was more aimed at a middle-grade audience reading on their own. (Which certainly is an audience of a traditional Oz novel, but not the only one.)

The Emerald Wand of Oz by Sherwood Smith
illustrated by William Stout

Published: 2005
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: February–March 2025

Aside from a confusing opening chapter (more on that later), the book focuses on Em and Dori, two sisters from modern Kansas, supposedly related to Dorothy Gale. They are children of recently divorced parents, and Dori has dealt with this by retreating into fantasy and imagination; she's a big fan of the Oz books, and sends her toy ponies on adventures. Em has dealt with this by treating everything factually and rationally; she keeps her toy ponies in pristine condition on the shelf. The two are magically whisked to Oz during a tornado, where they end up in a country ruled by unicorns attended to by doting children. (I thought that the geography is right for this to be Unicorners from Ruth Plumly Thompson's Ojo in Oz, but double-checking, it looks like Unicorners is in the Munchkin country, and the valley here is in the Quadling.) Initially Dori is thrilled and Em is not, but both girls come to agree that it's an unpleasant place and attempt to make their escape, which takes some doing, including assistance from a friendly mermaid and a mysterious vagabond boy named Rik.

After this, the girls plus Rik travel to Glinda's palace to seek her help in getting home, only to discover that Glinda has become vapid; a wicked witch named Bastina (the niece of the Wicked Witch of the West) has cast a spell on Ozma, rendering her and all loyal to her empty-headed and impressionable, though this doesn't affect magically animated beings. Thus, the girls must work together with the Scarecrow, Scraps, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the Glass Cat to travel to Bastinda's castle and undo her enchantment, all the while trying to see how much they can trust Rik... who turns out to be Nome! (Specifically, the son of the original-but-deposed Nome King, Ruggedo f.k.a. Roquat. By this point, I think Ruggedo's a cactus according to Handy Mandy, but I don't believe these books ever specify his whereabouts.)

As always, my six-year-old seemed to have a good time; I think they particularly enjoyed the shenanigans involved in the battle against Bastinda and her dimwitted gecko guards. 

I found the book a bit frustrating because it promises something it doesn't quite deliver. The opening of the book really hinges on character conflict between Em and Dori, Em's logic versus Dori's imagination. One imagines, then, that the book ought to resolve this conflict... but it doesn't, not really. At a certain point, the girls are just getting along and everything is fine. It's frustrating, because it seems like the ingredients are all there: obviously Dori turns out to be right, when Oz is real, but surely Em should also turn out to be right, and I feel like the obvious moment for this is when the girls are in Unicorn Valley. Like, Dori's love of fantasy should have her seduced by the glamor of the unicorns in a way that Em is able to see through, and the girls learn to pool their strengths. But this doesn't quite happen; by the end, Em has just come around to Dori's side and they get along, but there's not really any moment or moments that push them there. It's frustrating because the book is so close on that score.

Smith's Oz feels a bit less whimsical than Baum's; she includes his whimsical characters, but her own additions to the mythos feel like very familiar ones to a twentieth-century children's fantasy fan: unicorns and mermaids and hints of dragons. It feels like Oz for the My Little Pony generation. (This was before Friendship is Magic, so I guess I mean the OG MLP generation; Smith would have been in her thirties when that came out.) There's nothing like the Dainty China Country or the Wheelers or what-have-you here. Some of the emphasis on using magic to perform mundane tasks (like doing dishes or washing clothes) feels a bit Harry Potter, which I suppose is right; this came out at the same time as the sixth novel, at the height of Pottermania. It feels like a more "conventional" fantasy realm than the one Baum gave us. I think the result of this is, unfortunately, that Smith's Oz doesn't feel like as "fun" a place for its main characters to travel through as Baum's. There's a joy in crossing (most of) Baum's landscapes that's largely lacking here.

I was intrigued by Smith's hints about the wider Oz world; Bastinda apparently went to some kind of magical school, but this isn't spelled out. Again, this is probably a Harry Potter–inspired thing, but Ruth Plumly Thompson did allude to a school for wicked magic-users in one of her books! I wanted to know more about the origins and motivations of Bastinda than we got here.

Perhaps we will, or perhaps Smith intended to, anyway. There are indications here of a larger story arc; Dorothy is missing, and Glinda and Ozma are unable to locate her with the Magic Picture or the Great Book of Records. There's also a mysterious cloud with evil faces in it that occasionally bedevils our heroes. Rik, too, is set up to return—he is a focal character in Smith's next book, Trouble Under Oz in fact. I enjoyed Rik, and Smith does a good job pacing out the clues as to Rik's true nature; my six-year-old picked up on it immediately before it was revealed. On the other hand, as alluded to above, I found the opening chapter frustrating. It contains an overwhelming amount of exposition about a magic crystal ball in Dori's possession, and I'm not sure why, as this all needs to be reexplained to Dori later on. My six-year-old—usually quite good with this kind of thing!—got confused pretty easily. Why not have us find out this stuff as Dori does? Feels like something an editor misguidedly demanded Smith add to the book.

The illustrations by Stout are pretty stately, usually portraits instead of scenes. I can certainly see their technical competence, but they feel devoid of the Ozzian whimsy that suffuses the work of Denslow, Shanower, and especially Neill.

Next up in sequence: Trouble Under Oz