Reading The Nome King's Shadow in Oz Aloud to My Kids

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
illustrated by Donald Abbott

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. 

Reading The Patchwork Bride of Oz Aloud to My Kid—We Begin Our Journey into the Noncanonical!

As chronicled at length here on this blog, my kid and I spent several years reading all the "official" Oz books: the Famous Forty plus other books written by Royal Historians, published by the Oz Club, or authorized by the Baum Estate. This project took sixty-two books and four years.

What next? Well, it turns out my kids literally don't know of a world where you don't read a chapter of an Oz book every other day, so we're turning our attention to the so-called noncanonical Oz apocrypha. We (largely) read the official Oz books in publication order, but I decided to handle these differently. I made a list of all the noncanonical Oz books that either 1) I already owned, or 2) I didn't own but thought sounded interesting, and then used a random number generator to select one. In between them, we'll be reading stories by L. Frank Baum from the Oz Club collection of his complete short stories.

The Patchwork Bride of Oz by Gilbert M. Sprague
illustrated by Denis McFarling

Published: 1993
Acquired and previously read: 199?
Read aloud: July 2025

The first spin of the dice brings us to The Patchwork Bride of Oz, one of the many continuation novels released by Books of Wonder's Emerald City Press imprint in the 1990s. Though at the time I devoured them, in retrospect the quality was... inconsistent at best. This one is surely a case in point. A story of how the Scarecrow and Scraps the Patchwork Girl get married (their flirtation was established back in Scraps's original appearance, but little had been done with it since), it runs a mere three (unnumbered and untitled) chapters across 38 pages; the book is padded at the end with some pictures of Scraps and the Scarecrow by John R. Neill reproduced from other Oz books.

Reading it as an adult, it's pretty bad. Scraps and the Scarecrow only decide to get married because the Love Magnet makes them. Wow, what romance. My kid was pretty confused by this part, and expected it to be undone and/or explained, which is totally reasonable. It is not. They then do get married. The Wogglebug criticizes Scraps's choice of attire, and the Scarecrow can't decide what suit to wear, but otherwise there are no obstacles or plot. The characters live together a little, but then decide that they miss their old lives, so go back to them. The end. 

Like, why? What was the point of this? It reads like particularly bad fanfiction, by someone who doesn't know how stories are supposed to work. Why publish this? I have never read Oziana (the official short story magazine of the Oz Club) but surely it published better work than this.

Going into the "noncanonical" books, I warned my kid their unofficial status meant some might contain things that would go unreflected in others. Once we finished Patchwork Bride, I said there would be no other Oz book where Scraps and the Scarecrow were married. That was okay, they said... this book must just take place after all of those! Already a timeliner at heart.

Incidentally, I was trying to fill out Gilbert M. Sprague's LibraryThing author page and found very little to go on out there. I found obituaries for a couple different Gilbert M. Spragues, both the right age to have written this book, but in neither case was there any good evidence to link them to Oz. So if you know when he was born, when/if he died, where he lived, I'd be interested to hear it. I did find a brief but interesting mention of him on a blog about gay youth in the 1970s, though, where the writer calls him "my friend and sometimes lover Gilbert Sprague (who went on to write two books in the ongoing Oz series, along with editing the monthly Oz fanzine for Books of Wonder)."