Reading The Ozmapolitan of Oz Aloud to My Kid

After illustrating several Oz books by others—two by the McGraws and two by Ruth Plumly Thompson—Oz superfan Dick Martin illustrated his own Oz book for the International Wizard of Oz Club, The Ozmapolitan of Oz. The book takes its title from a "newspaper" sometimes produced by Reilly & Lee to promote the Oz books; here, for the first time, it is established within an actual Oz book, depicted as being founded by the Wizard back when he was the ruler of the Emerald City. The protagonist is Septimius "Tim" Septentrion, a copyboy for the paper who thinks it could be something great instead of the lazy operation it is. With Dorothy, Eureka the Pink Kitten, and a Mifkit named Jinx (possible the Mifket from Scalawagons), he sets out on an expedition to promote the newspaper and obtain interesting stories.

The Ozmapolitan of Oz by Dick Martin

Originally published: 1986
Acquired: December 2023
Read aloud: September–October 2024

The newspaper angle ends up being incredibly unimportant in the end; Tim and company don't travel around doing journalism or anything like that, it's just the usual Oz hijinks of bumping into random people and places and moving on. Indeed, the book is definitely on the low end for incident, because usually the protagonists just meet someone, talk to them, and go somewhere else, and their overarching goal is honestly pretty hard to care about. They have no particular destination, they have no particular problem they are trying to solve. Nor do they really solve any particular problems, and most of the places they go are not really very interesting. It's like a weak Thompson novel but without Thompson's manic energy or commitment to excruciating puns. You're just left with... not much of anything, to be honest.

Martin tries to add in some kind of suspense, I guess, with a mysterious crow following the adventuring party about, and a mystery involving Tim. The details are so slight, however, there's little to glom onto; I think my six-year-old didn't even remember there had been a crow in the book before when it showed up for the second time. It turns out Tim is a prince trying to prove himself—the fun twist here is that he is trying to prove he can accomplish things because in his country royalty are not supposed to accomplish things. It's sort of an inversion of Thompson's Purple Prince of Oz. But unfortunately we don't even know he's trying to prove himself until we're told what the twist is, so it all falls flat, and my six-year-old didn't really follow it at all. I think it could have added some suspense, but not if it's all dumped on you in the second-last chapter.

On top of all this, Tim is a pretty dull protagonist, Dick Martin is one of those writers who doesn't remember how plucky Baum actually made Dorothy, and you could take Jinx the Mifket out of the book without affecting a thing. Only Eureka shows an ounce of characterization or energy. If you read Oz books for the interactions between interesting characters (and I do), there's none of it here. Sometimes Jinx and Eureka snipe a bit but that's about it.

Plus, weirdly, it seems like Dick Martin is as uninterested in providing visuals of his own ideas as he was those of the McGraws and Thompson. The pictures are scanty and often dull.

Anyway, I guess it has a few moments of charm (I like the bit where Eureka tricks a dinosaur with grammatical terms) but overall I found this had little going for it, and it seemed to leave little impression on my kid.

Next up in sequence: The Hidden Prince of Oz

Reading The Forbidden Fountain of Oz Aloud to My Kid

Yankee in Oz and Enchanted Island created a precedent—like them, Forbidden Fountain is a return to Oz published by the International Wizard of Oz Club written by a "Royal Historian," in this case, the mother-and-daughter team of Eloise and Lauren McGraw, authors of the final "Famous Forty" novel, Merry Go Round in Oz. And like them, it has somewhat mediocre illustrations provided by Dick Martin.

The Forbidden Fountain of Oz by Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren Lynn McGraw
illustrated by Dick Martin

Originally published: 1980
Acquired: July 2024
Read aloud: September 2024

I was looking forward to this a lot, because I knew it had a cracker of a premise. Ozma accidentally drinks the Water of Oblivion from the Forbidden Fountain, forgetting who she is; as "Poppy," disguised as a boy, she ends up wandering the countryside of Oz. While the denizens of the Royal Palace search for her, it's Kabumpo, the Elegant Elephant of Oz, who stumbles upon her—only in classic Kabumpo fashion, he gets the situation entirely wrong. Plus, it was by the writers of my favorite post-Baum novel in the Famous Forty.

Perhaps because my expectations were so high, I found it mildly disappointing... though I should say it's probably also my favorite of the "quasi-canonical" Oz novels I've read so far, except for maybe Wicked Witch. The first couple chapters are great, with a really compelling set-up. In fact, they were so intense that after the first chapter, my six-year-old was so freaked out by Ozma's loss of memory, that they declared they didn't want to read any more of the book! It took me a bit to persuade them that surely everything would be all right in the end (as it always is, in an Oz book) and thus that we ought to press on and keep going.

I also really liked the role of Kabumpo. If there's a complaint to be lodged with the post-Thompson Oz novels, it's that the sense of continuity abates somewhat; Neill picks up some of Thompson's characters and concepts (in his own distinctive way, at least) but then in the later Famous Forty books, Jack Snow and Rachel Cosgrove ignore everything post-Baum, as did the McGraws their first time out. But here, Thompson's Kabumpo is a main player—and I think they do very well by him. Like in Kabumpo in Oz and Lost King, Kabumpo here has good intentions... but his self-assurance and vanity causes him to get a key detail very wrong. It's a good showing for a character who hasn't had a key role for some time.

The McGraws give us some striking images, particularly the creepy maze in the Emerald City that was used to exile people in the time of King Pastoria, and some fun new characters, particularly Toby the highwayman who doesn't have the nerve to actually rob someone. There's also a fun area called the "Bordermoor," which is between the Gillikin and Winkie countries,* and thus things there are both purple and yellow. Other worldbuilding note: The book tells us there are Roma people in Oz (not that it uses that term), contradicting Ojo in Oz, which ended with Ozma sending them all back to Europe.

Where the book falls down for me is that if Merry Go Round was like a strong Thompson, this is like a weak one, in that the protagonists move between largely uninteresting locations and don't really do anything interesting to get out of them. Merry Go Round had a lot of team problem-solving, one of my favorite things in an Oz book, but this is one of those Oz books where the characters more stumble in and out of places without much deliberate action on their own part. The result is kind of unmemorable, like reading Purple Prince. I would particularly liked to have seen Ozma shown some steel or ingenuity as "Poppy," but she is pretty timid and directionless. C'mon, Tip was awesome!

That said, unlike many Thompsons, it does have a strong ending. When Ozma makes it back to the Emerald City, the first person she sees is Jack Pumpkinhead, who calls her "Tip." My kid was like, "It's because she's a boy!" No no, I pooh-poohed, Jack is just seeing some kind of essence of Ozma. But they were right and I was wrong! In boy's clothes, Ozma looks like Tip, and there's a touching scene where Jack and Mombi are all Ozma can remember. My kid was bouncing off the wall in excitement as everything came together in the last two chapters. 

When I asked if they liked it, they gave me the thumbs-up sign five times. "Each thumbs up means one star," they explained. So I guess they were into it! When I asked it that was despite how scary the beginning had been, they insisted the beginning hadn't been scary at all.

Next up in sequence: The Ozmapolitan of Oz

* For some reason this is a trope of many of my recent Oz books; Hidden Valley, Yankee, Enchanted Island, and Forbidden Fountain all go back and forth between these two countries. Where are my Munchkins at?

Reading The Enchanted Island of Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Enchanted Island of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson
illustrated by Dick Martin

After the success of Yankee in Oz, the Oz Club asked Ruth Plumly Thompson if she had any more manuscripts—and she did, an unpublished fantasy novel about a boy and his camel who go Somewhere. So Thompson rewrote it a little bit to take place in Oz, and the Club published it in 1976.

Originally published: 1976
Acquired: December 2023
Read aloud: August–September 2024

If Yankee was somewhat generic Thompson adventure but fun enough to get away with it, Enchanted Island is a somewhat generic Thompson adventure but largely not fun enough to get away with it. I liked Humpty the Camel well enough, and some of the stuff about Kapurta, the "enchanted island" of the title, is pretty fun, but aside from that, there wasn't much to this. David and Humpty go from place to place, go away, and so on. There's little cleverness, little sense of adventure. Like in a lot of Thompsons, everything is pretty much solved accidentally and with little input from our protagonists; ideas that are set up in the beginning (such as Humpty's longing for the king he was torn away from) are never returned to. There weren't a lot of pictures in Dick Martin's Yankee, but it seems to me that here there are even fewer ones. It's perfectly serviceable as an Oz book, and very quick, but you've read a lot of it before.

Despite that, I found myself wanting a sequel. There's a lot of interesting elements here that could make a great story; I'd love to see David return to Kapurta to be reunited with Humpty and King Rupert and go on some kind of quest involving the magic wishing buttons.

Still, my six-year-old seemed decently into it... but I'd also guess that a week after we finished it, they'd struggle to tell you much about it. Although, they were very much delighted by all the magic party shenanigans in the last chapter involving the birthday button! (I edited out the claim that the Cowardly Lion liked and would adopt the name "Cowy"; c'mon now, no way.)

Next up in sequence: The Forbidden Fountain of Oz

Reading Yankee in Oz Aloud to My Kid

Yankee in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson
illustrated by Dick Martin

In, I believe, the late 1950s, Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote an Oz book and offered it to Reilly & Lee (this would have been after Hidden Valley, before Merry Go Round), but they were uninterested. Over a decade later, the International Wizard of Oz Club offered to publish her manuscript (with permission from the official publisher) with illustrations by Dick Martin, making it the first of their so-called "quasi-canonical" Oz books. My kid and I read it after Merry Go Round, when it was finally published.

Originally published: 1973
Acquired: July 2024
Read aloud: July–August 2024

Before this, Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote nineteen Oz books, and I have read enough of them to know exactly what to expect. Thomas P. Terry, better known as "Tompy" is a band kid and football player swept by a hurricane right out of a Labor Day parade into Oz; there he meets Yankee, a test dog for a NASA moon orbit whose capsule crash-landed in Oz as well. As is pretty typical, Thompson devotes little time to justifying the adventure and just kind of gets on with it. Thompson always does well by animals, and the charming relationship between Tompy and Yankee, who quickly become devoted to each other, is the real highlight of the book. This lacks the frantic pacing of  some of her books; Tompy and Yankee travel from place to place and meet interesting people. The idea of people you can make by just adding water to a powder is a great Ozzy visual, and I really enjoyed the tone of the section about the Lanternese, who have paper lanterns for heads (and thus cannot speak).

Like a lot of Thompson books, there's also the ingredients for an interesting quest she doesn't quite deliver on. Tompy and Yankee are asked by the people of Wackajammy to rescue their lost princess, but they selfishly refuse. In a book by a different author, you might expect this would be a set-up for a moral lesson to the protagonists... but not so here! They refuse to be helpful, and accidentally bump into her and rescue her and are lauded as heroes for it. Wow. They do both get some good heroic moments, though, taking down the giant Badmannah, who has been kidnapping princesses for his cave. (On the other hand, there are two separate occasions where Tompy bangs his drumsticks on something for no reason and that ends up coincidentally being exactly what was needed to be done.) Badmannah escalates up to kidnapping an oddly powerless and resourceless Ozma (well, par for the course for Thompson, again), and Jinnicky, Tompy, and Yankee manage to save her. Sometimes Thompson protagonists contribute nothing, while convenient magicians show up, and there is a bit of that with Jinnicky the Red Jinn, but both characters have their own pivotal moments.

There's also a prophecy that seems like it should be important but goes nowhere, and Tompy and Yankee acquire a book that lets them read minds... which they never use to do anything significant! The careful plotting of Merry Go Round in Oz this is not; like a lot of Thompson's books, it reads like a first draft.

If she gets away with it, it's because of the aforementioned relationship between Yankee and Tompy. Unusually, the book has a whole chapter set back in America at the end. There's a real sense of sadness as it seems like they will have to give up their relationship because Yankee can't speak outside of Oz. This comes all right, of course, but I think my six-year-old was a bit tense, judging by how delighted he was when it all worked out. And there's a very fun bit where Tompy actually goes to a bookstore to buy a copy of Purple Prince to read to Yankee so he can know more about their friend Jinnicky. We've had a few Oz protagonists who have read Oz books, but this is the most specific reference thus far.

Dick Martin's illustrations are largely sparse and boring; whole chapters go by with no pictures, and lots are simple little images of Yankee. There are neat visuals and key characters that go wholly unillustrated. I guess he did it for free, but still.

Not one of Thompson's best, but not one of her worst, either. Pleasant but undemanding, which is sometimes what you want out of a trip to Oz, after all.

I bought print-on-demand copies of this book and Forbidden Fountain from Lulu, where they have been put by the Oz Club. The original 1970s edition was oversized, with lots of text on big pages; this was a hardcover at the same size as all the other Oz books. It had an unfortunate number of typos, though; very distracting. Picking up these two books finished off my collection of "quasi-canonical" novels, which you can see to the right. Lining them up, I was appreciative that Eric Shanower maintained a consistent visual design for the three he illustrated... even though they were released by three different publishers!

Next up in sequence: The Enchanted Island of Oz

Reading Merry Go Round in Oz Aloud to My Kid

Merry Go Round in Oz by Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren McGraw
illustrated by Dick Martin

Another landmark Oz book for me and my kid—the last of the Famous Forty! This one was already in my collection, so I did own it as a kid... but it's the only installment in the Famous Forty to not appear on my c. 1997 list of all Oz books, so apparently I didn't know about it as of then. The only memory I have retained of it is the first chapter, where Oregon orphan Robin Brown grabs the brass ring on a merry-go-round and is transported to Oz; literally none of the rest of the book was even remotely familiar as I reread it. This is a shame because as an adult reader, I loved it. This was definitely my favorite post-Baum Oz novel, and to be honest, there's more than a few Baum novels I would say it exceeds too.

Originally published: 1963
Acquired: 1998?
Read aloud: July 2024

The plot owes more to Ruth Plumly Thompson's Oz than Baum's in some ways, reminding of Grampa in Oz in particular, but also Kabumpo in Oz or Purple Prince: the prince of an eccentric, vaguely fairly tale Oz kingdom must go on a quest to save his people. (Though unlike in those books, there's no romance element to the quest.) This isn't really the kind of thing Baum went in for, by and large. In this case, the jousting- and genealogy-obsessed Munchkin enclave of Halidom has lost three Golden Circlets that grant its inhabitants strength, intelligence, and skill in handicrafts. Prince Gules goes on a quest to reacquire them, though as he lacks both intelligence and strength, the quest is really being managed by the page Fess, who comes from the neighboring kingdom of Troth; they are accompanied by Fess's pet Flittermouse (half-mouse, half-bat), Gules's steed Fred (who ostentatiously styles himself Federigo, but is secretly descended from a plow-horse), and a fairy Unicorn (supposedly the only unicorn in Oz, but a footnote reminds us there are other unicorns in Oz that the people of Halidom don't know about; see Magic of Oz and Ojo).

Merry Go Round also merges in notes of Gnome King, Yellow Knight, or especially Speedy in its use of a boy American protagonist who gets to Oz in circumstances that are admittedly somewhat dubious and underexplained. Robin Brown is an orphan in foster care who grabs a magic brass ring on a merry-go-round, transporting him to Oz, but also (for reasons never explained) the merry-go-round horse he was riding, which comes to life. He dubs her "Merry Go Round," and he and Merry are of course swept up into a number of adventures as they try to get to the Emerald City, where hopefully Princess Ozma will be able to transport them home and make Merry into a Real Horse.

At first, we go back and forth between the two parties; eventually the book adds in Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, who are (initially) setting out to see the Easter Bunny to order Easter eggs for an upcoming Easter party in the Emerald City. First Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion encounter the party from Halidom; then all three groups converge in the city of Roundabout, whose inhabitants think Robin is their prophesied king.

I don't think it's a coincidence that coauthor Eloise Jarvis McGraw is basically the only post-Baum "Royal Historian" to have had a career as a children's author outside of the Oz books; indeed, she was a Newbery Honor recipient three different times! More than any other Oz book, this one actually cares about the characters and development of its protagonists. Robin, who always feels passed over, must learn to speak up if he's to help Merry. Gules must learn how to act as a leader. Fess must manage a group of people without letting them know they're being managed. Flitter must learn to be brave. Fred must learn to not be so vain. Merry must learn what a "Real Horse" actually is. All of the McGraws' original characters have little arcs, and while Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion don't really change, she does well by them, too. While the McGraws are clearly imitating Thompson, this is a depth of characterization and theme that Thompson herself never achieved (except, perhaps, in Kabumpo). She's also a more subtle writer than some of her predecessors, with more stuff communicated through allusion at times; I would say the reading level is pitched slightly higher than most Famous Forty books.

It's a large set of characters, and I do think my kid found this a bit hard to keep track of at first; plus, there's a lot of exposition in the first Halidom chapter, and conversely, the lack of direct explanation at some points meant I had to spell things out. But unlike some other Oz books with large casts (e.g., Hidden Valley), the McGraws are very careful to give everyone something meaningful to do, both in terms of little bits of business throughout, also in that every character meaningfully contributes to the problem-solving multiple times. There's, for example, some good gags about the vegetarian food the Cowardly Lion is forced to eat in the Easter Bunny's kingdom, and the escape from the Land of Good Children is an excellent sequence, pure Oz problem solving combined with pure Oz whimsy.

I came to enjoy every single one of these characters, and it seems a shame that though McGraw made two returns to Oz, I don't think she ever followed up on any of these characters. I want to see Robin and Merry come into their own, or what Fess is like as he grows older! (I have a theory about him...) There were a lot of fun, distinct voices to do here. I of course particularly loved doing the over-the-top princely declamations of Prince Gules. The end of the book is good, too; things are wrapped up for everyone quite nicely.

I think it's a long book. (I looked around for a list of Oz book word counts but couldn't find one; some enterprising fan must have done this, though.) It runs the usual twenty-ish chapters, and several Oz books are longer in terms of page count, but I felt like the typeface was smaller and chapters often took almost thirty minutes to read aloud instead of the usual fifteen/twenty. Despite this, we read it less than three weeks (we usually average an Oz book a month) because my kid kept asking for extra chapters, so they must have been into it. They were very into the untangling of the books' two prophecies,* and the finding of the three circlets, and they very much liked the journey map contained in the front of book. I think it was slightly over their head in some spots, in a way no Oz book we've read has been for a while, but in a good way.(The only thing to not like in this regard is more an issue for the child reader than the adult one; by the time the key character of Sir Greves returned in the last couple chapters, I don't think my kid remembered him from the first couple chapters at all!)

Dick Martin illustrates, the first of several books by him we'll be reading. I didn't care for his take on Dorothy, and he's no John R. Neill, but his style is well-suited to the tone of the book. Like many of the late Famous Forty books, my big issue with the pictures is that there ought to be more of them!

Next up in sequence: Yankee in Oz

* Come to think of it, this is a bit of a Thompson trope too, but unlike Thompson, who often seemed to fudge them, the McGraws spend some time at the end of the book spelling out exactly how all the prophecies actually worked out. Thompson clearly made her books up as she went along, but this one is obviously carefully planned and plotted.