The Twinkle Tales was a series of short stories published by L. Frank Baum in 1906 and 1907, originally as a series of small books, illustrated by Maginel Wright Enright (sister of Frank Lloyd Wright, fact fans!). The first six came out in 1906, and were later published as Twinkle and Chubbins: Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland. In 1907, Baum published a longer installment, Policeman Bluejay; Baum asked for a 1917 reprint of this to appear with the subtitle "An Oz Tale," though the publisher was not interested in this. All seven stories were not collected in a single volume until 2005, by University of Nebraska Press.
This I picked up from the library back when I was in grad school. I think this is possibly the only non-Oz Baum fantasy book I didn't read to my kid on our first run through the Oz books, because I assumed it was in the Oz Club's collection of L. Frank Baum's short stories, but it turns out that it is not. (Probably because the two books came out around the same time and had the same editor, and she didn't want the one to cannibalize the other.) Policeman Bluejay is also reprinted in issue #2 of Oz-story, but when I read the rest of that book to my kids, I didn't want to read it without having read the preceding Twinkle tales, so I purchased this and read it aloud to my kids.
The Twinkle Tales by L. Frank Baum |
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| Collection published: 2005 Contents originally published: 1905-06 Acquired: February 2026 Read aloud: February–March 2026 |
Mostly, these stories focus on "Twinkle," a girl living in the prairie in the early twentieth century; in most, but not all, she's joined by her friend Chubbins. Mostly the stories revolved around animals: she visits a town of talking prairie dogs, talks to a woodchuck family, goes on an adventure with a mud-turtle prince, and so on. Some do that thing Baum loved to do and was very good at, which is extrapolate on what animals were actually like to imagine what they would be like if they could talk. We discover what it is to live as a prairie dog from Twinkle talking as the prairie dogs. Others are more fantastical, with the animals being more like generic fantasyland residents. There is a bit of an ecological strain here, with the animals often disliking how humans treat them. That, perhaps, is the most interesting achievement of the book, how it uses fantasy to reposition your perspective. The stories are sometimes framed as dreams, though that doesn't necessarily mean they didn't happen! There's no continuity between them, for Twinkle anyway; one would never know from one Twinkle story that she had already encountered magic in a different one.
One is barely about Twinkle: in "Bandit Jim Crow," she has a pet crow, but it escapes, and most of the story is about what it does away from her, in a forest governed by Policeman Bluejay. Policeman Bluejay reappears in the story of that title, where he actually does interact with Twinkle and Chubbins, who are turned into birds with human heads by a witch. This one has Baum's characteristic interest in weird forms of government; here, the birds of the forest have a hierarchy based on beauty.
Overall, reading them aloud to the kids, I found them cute but kind of ephemeral. They were into them well enough when we were reading them, particularly "Policeman Bluejay" ("dry water" was a hit), but it's hard for me to imagine that these will leave as lasting an impression on them as the Oz novels. (Fun fact: Twinkle knows about Dorothy because she has read the Oz books! As Baum originally published these books under a pseudonym, it's a bit of a sly joke on his part.)
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