Reading The Speckled Rose of Oz Aloud to My Kids

"The Early Days of Oz" was a series of books from Books of Wonder back in the 1990s, all written and illustrated by Donald Abbott, chronicling, well, what it says in the title. There were six, two of them being prequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the other four set in the gap between Wonderful Wizard and Marvelous Land, when the Scarecrow ruled the Emerald City. I assume this was all mostly because Abbott's illustrative style (at least in these books) is very imitative of W. W. Denslow. As a kid, I owned the two prequels, but just one of the interquels, The Speckled Rose of Oz. I am not motivated to pick up the other interquels (Magic Chest, Father Goose, and Amber Flute), but I was willing to read the one I already owned to my kids in the gap where it takes place.

The Speckled Rose of Oz
by Donald Abbott

Published: 1995
Acquired and previously read: late 1990s
Read aloud: April 2026

Rereading it, I feel validated in this decision because it is, quite frankly, awful. There are probably some ingredients here for a good Oz adventure, but the plot is terribly constructed. At its beginning, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion are judging a flower competition. (Abbott always calls the latter simply "Lion" because he's no longer "cowardly," which I guess makes sense, but is not really consistent with any of the following books.) One of the entrants is Sir Gyle, who turns out to be the brother of the Wicked Witches of East and West out for revenge, and who attempts to assassinate the Scarecrow wirh a fire-breathing flower. Then all the flowers of Oz begin to disappear, because of an evil living tree called Poison Oak. You might think these two things are linked... but no, it's a complete coincidence! The three friends of Dorothy travel to stop Poison Oak, secretly being harassed by Sir Gyle. On their way, they bump into Lady Minerva Moonstruck, the daughter of the Old Man in the Moon, who is searching for her missing husband. When they find Poison Oak, they defeat him quite easily, but then his pet spider turns out to be Lady Minerva's husband, who also wants to take over Oz... but don't worry, they don't need to do anything interesting or clever, because she turns up and recaptures her errant husband. The threesome then has to go back and defeat Sir Gyle.

None of it is interesting or clever. I did like the idea of Sir Gyle (I'm always down for peeks into the lore of the wicked witches), but reading it right after Wonderful Wizard, where this trio is clever, kind, and brave when they have to do things, the contrast here is stark, given they mostly bumble their way around and accomplish everything either by accident or with the assistance of Glinda. Abbott is a very sloppy plotter; there's a particularly bad bit where the Lion falls into a chasm, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman go on without him, and the Lion catches up to them a bit later, and we learn that in the same amount of time they walked to Poison Oak's cottage, he landed in an underground river, was carried away by it for miles until it flowed to the surface, and then somehow tracked the other two to the cottage.

At least it's short, and at least the pictures are nice. My kids were, as always I suppose, entertained well enough, but I'm pretty sure a couple days after we'd finished it, had already forgotten its insubstantial happenings.

Continuity note:

At the beginning, Gayelette is mentioned as one of the participants in the flower competition. Gayelette is the sorceress mentioned in Wonderful Wizard as binding the Winged Monkeys to the Golden Cap. She was never mentioned again the Famous Forty, so it's weird to me to imagine her as someone still alive in the present day of Oz, as opposed to being a distant historical figure.

Reading L. Frank Baum's Dot and Tot of Merryland Aloud to My Son

Dot and Tot of Merryland by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by Donald Abbott

Once again, my four-year-old son and I ended up with a gap between finishing one Oz book and getting ahold of the next. After a streak of three Thompsons came to an end with Giant Horse of Oz, our copy of Jack Pumpkinhead was not even shipped. So I proposed that we read my very last "borderlands" book, Dot and Tot of Merryland.

Originally published: 1901
Read aloud: September 2022

Like many of Baum's early books, you can (retrospectively, at least) look back and see why Wonderful Wizard worked and this did not. "Dot" and "Tot" are two small children—she a child of privilege whose father buys a country estate just so she can get some fresh air, he the child of the estate's gardener—who fall asleep in a boat while exploring, which comes unmoored and drifts down an underground river into Merryland. Merryland is a country divided into seven valleys, which are home to, in turn, clowns, candy, babies, dolls, cats, wind-up animals, and lost things. Dot and Tot basically drift from valley to valley, interacting with each one's inhabitants and then moving on; there's no real quest here except for a vague sense they want to get home. It's nowhere near as purposeful as Dorothy's trip to Oz; it's much more akin to the seemingly purposeless wanderings in The Sea Fairies, The Enchanted Island of Yew, and The Master Key.

On the other hand, it lacks the violence of the latter two, and for a kid hearing a chapter every day, that kind of focus matters less. He had fun hearing about each strange place in turn, which is clearly what Baum wanted.

Baum's wild imagination is on display here; though some of the valleys aren't very interesting (cats, clowns), others are filled with neat ideas and evocative imagery, such as the Valley of Babies, where babies fall from the sky in giant blossoms, and are tended to by storks until they are ready to be carried to the outside world to be born. Mr. Split, the man who can split himself into two parts is a great concept, and the Valley of Lost Things is suitably creepy and forlorn. In the Valley of Dolls, Dot and Tot are joined by the Queen of Merryland, who goes to the remaining valleys with them, thus removing what modicum of danger there was. The idea that she kind of needs to force them to stay by adopting them is interesting, but at the end of the book, she just changes her mind and lets them leave anyway.

We read the 1990s Books of Wonder edition, which replaces the original illustrations by W. W. Denslow with new ones by Donald Abbott, which are clearly designed to emulate Denslow's as much as possible. They're nice enough.

(Worldbuilding implications: the book indicates that there are "real" clowns from the Valley of Clowns in Merryland, who go into the outside world to entertain children, and fake clowns, who are just humans putting on make-up. This means Notta Bit More from Cowardly Lion is a fake clown... which is, frankly, not too surprising. Does the Valley of Clowns have any connection to Oz's Play City, a settlement of pierrettes and pierrots in the Winkie Country from Grampa in Oz?)

We went to my son's Oz continent map to see where Merryland was... but it was one of the places he had elected not to draw. So he decided to draw his own map of Merryland. I don't think he really gets what a "valley" is, actually; he clearly conceptualized it as a series of islands. He carefully counted out the seven valleys, but having done that kept going and added three more: the Valley of Dogs, the Valley of Ducks, and the Valley of Cats, Dogs, and Ducks! Room for sequels, I guess!

(The official Oz Club map puts Merryland between the Deadly Desert and the Nonestic Ocean, even though Dot and Tot get there via an underground river from Massachusetts. Even if you argue that the river is magic or something, the placement is a bit tricky, since the clowns get to the outside world by rolling down the mountains that surround the country. Hopefully none of them roll into the Deadly Desert!)

I have seen some Oz marathons incorporate all of Baum's other "Nonestic" fantasies in publication order, but this creates the problem that he mostly published them early in his career, and thus it takes a long time to get to the actual Oz novels. Or you could chuck them all at the end, but that creates the problem that you end up reading a lot of quite honestly mediocre novels in a row. Thus, I've been pretty happy with how we've ended up pausing the Thompsons every few books to take in one of them, even if it was kind of an inadvertent plan. Baum actually wrote one more, John Dough and the Cherub, but I don't own it, as it wasn't in print when I was an Oz-obsessed child. Since then, though, there's been an edition from Hungry Tiger Press, so I imagine I will pick it up and we will give it a go sooner or later.

Next up in sequence: Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz