I reread my original review from when I read this one aloud to my older kid five years ago. I don't know if I would quite that harsh... but this is definitely still the weakest of the six original Oz books. It's got all these different parts that don't really go together. Dorothy and her family coming to Oz is neat but it's not meaningfully connected to the Nome King's invasion, which also really has nothing to do with Dorothy's visits to all the (what some Oz fans call) "irrelevant enclaves" in the Quadling Country. The concepts of Bunbury, Bunnybury, etc. are cute, but have nothing to do with anything, and in most cases, Dorothy and friends turn up, talk to these people, and just leave. So what?
The Emerald City of Oz by L. Frank Baum |
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| Originally published: 1910 Acquired: September 2021 Previously read: December 2021 Reread aloud: October–November 2026 |
This is the first novel where Dorothy's "adventuring party" is made up of a bunch of preexisting characters. (The inclusion of the Wizard in Dorothy and the Wizard is kind of an exception, I would argue, as he had never been a protagonist before.) Here, she is accompanied by the Wizard, Billina, the Shaggy Man, the Saw-Horse, her aunt and uncle... and even the Soldier with the Green Whiskers. But I don't get why Baum did this. The Saw-Horse is there to pull the wagon, but that's it. To the extent that any cleverness is needed, it all comes from the Wizard, so we don't get to see the other characters demonstrate any problem-solving skills. The Shaggy Man and Omby Amby's inclusion feels particularly pointless; they just occasionally say things to remind you they exist. I do always like Billina, but she just can't do much with all the other characters around. Baum obviously realizes this problem himself eventually, because he has Dorothy get lost with just Billina and Toto for company.
Strip away all the excess characters, and I reckon you could have done something quite clever and interesting. If there was an adventure of just Dorothy, her aunt and uncle, and maybe the Soldier. Then you have a small cast of characters without powers, most of whom we've not seen on an adventure before, and we can focus on how that goes. As it is, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry feel very lost, but surely their acclimation to Oz ought to be the heart of the novel? Of all the Baum Oz novels, this is maybe the one that seems most ripe for a rewrite.
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