My kids and I have been rereading Baum's original Oz books, but interspersing chronologically appropriate stories that were written later: we read The Speckled Rose of Oz between Wonderful Wizard and Marvelous Land, and "Ozma Sees Herself" between Marvelous Land and Ozma. For the gap between Ozma and Dorothy and the Wizard, we read one of the apocryphal Oz books I've had since I was a kid, The Nome King's Shadow in Oz. This was written by Gilbert M. Sprague, author of the mediocre Patchwork Bride, and illustrated by Donald Abbott, writer/artist of Speckled Rose.
The Nome King's Shadow in Oz by Gilbert M. Sprague |
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| Published: 1992 Acquired and previously read: late 1990s Read aloud: July 2026 |
The beginning of the story overlaps with the end of Ozma: when Ruggedo, the Nome King, is struck with Billina's egg, he falls apart. He pulls himself back together, but doesn't notice his shadow is missing. (Kid One objected that this isn't consistent with how the same scene is depicted in Ozma, and they are right.) The book then follows the shadow, who acquires his own independent existence as "Shady" and decides to travel to Oz to revenge himself upon Billina and the other inhabitants of the Emerald City.
It's a slight story, but it is undoubtedly better than either Patchwork Bride or Speckled Rose. The idea of "shadow hooks," where a shadow connects itself to its host, is a good one; Shady figures out how to use them to detach people's shadows and control them. It's the kind of magical-but-though-through thing that one could imagine L. Frank Baum himself coming up with; the darker tone of the concept with the kind of thing Baum was doing in later Oz books like Magic of Oz. Abbott is a pretty good illustrator who, as in Speckled Rose, is doing a W. W. Denslow pastiche; the highlight is probably seeing him render a bunch of John R. Neill–designed characters in Denslow's style. I particularly liked how he drew Billina... though my kids complained she didn't look like Billina!
Like a lot of Emerald City Press Oz books, it's short, and probably its biggest downfall is that Shady's schemes are pretty pedestrian (messing up the palace laundry and kitchens) and that the resolution of it all is pretty arbitrary and fairly easy. Certainly there are worse apocryphal Oz books, but there are much better Oz books in general. Probably my kids' favorite thing was learning about Billina's kids... but that's something Baum himself came up with, we just haven't got there yet! (I think we will learn about them in Dorothy and the Wizard.)
All that said, I did ask Kid Two who his favorite Oz character was... and he said Shady! So who knows.
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