(re)Reading Ozma of Oz Aloud to My Kids

Back when I read this aloud to Kid One, then three years old, I concluded it was one of the better Oz books. Now I've read it aloud again to Kids One and Two, now eight and five, and I stand by that assessment.

Ozma of Oz: A Record of Her Adventures with Dorothy Gale of Kansas, the Yellow Hen, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, Tiktok, the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger; Besides Other Good People too Numerous to Mention Faithfully Recorded Herein by L. Frank Baum
illustrated by John R. Neill

Originally published: 1906
Acquired and previously read: August 2021
Read aloud: May–June 2026

As I prepped this review, I skimmed some of the reviews on LibraryThing, and I was struck by one that noted, "As much I enjoy the story... at no point in the story do I ever worry about Dorothy, because she never worries.... [C]onsidering the almost continuous stream of dicey situations she gets into, she remains zen and mostly unbothered at all times, which really renders her rather dull. It takes away a lot of the excitement that should be building... I guess this is because it is a children's adventure, and Baum didn't want his readers getting upset, but I always liked a book that could make you cry as well as make you laugh." 

One of the interesting things about reading books aloud to kids is that you become aware of how kids process literature differently to how adults process literature, something you must of course have known at some point in your life, because you were once a kid yourself, but which you've clearly forgotten in the past thirty years. I agree that Baum usually has a very even-keeled tone: note very matter-of-fact way that things like the mutilation of the Tin Woodman or the attack of the wolves are communicated in Wonderful Wizard, something especially revealed by the contrasting choices made in some adaptations. A more modern writer, I suspect, would write sequences like Dorothy floating on the chicken coop in the ocean by telling you how scared Dorothy was, or crank up the suspense of the part where the Oz characters are trying to find the transformed Royal Family of Ev in the Nome King's palace and becoming transformed themselves.

But what I realized from reading this book aloud to a five-year-old is that a five-year-old doesn't need the prose to indicate how scary something is to be scared by it. Poor little guy was snuggling up to me for comfort when Dorothy was floating around on that chicken coop; poor little kid really did not like it when all the members of Ozma's party were being transformed, and I had to reassure him by reminding him that we had read later-set Oz books where Ozma was just fine! Kids, it seems, have an innate ability to just imagine themselves in a situation that adults lack. Kid Two doesn't need Baum to tell him Dorothy is scared because he imagines himself on a chicken coop in a storm in the Pacific Ocean and that is scary!

Kids also appreciate the moments of triumph: the kids loved when Billina hid herself and found out the Nome King's secret, and when she made her guesses—big whoops of delight.

Kid Two is apparently a Jack Pumpkinhead stan; near the end of the book, he complained that he hadn't turned up, and then was quite ecstatic when he appeared in the (what will be obligatory from this point on) end-of-book celebration scene. This was a fun one to read aloud again.

Continuity note: My kids did not remember that Glinda met the Nome King, and he acquired his Magic Belt, in Ages of Oz, even though we only read it five months ago! Oh well.

(re)Reading The Marvelous Land of Oz Aloud to My Kids

As I have mentioned previously, I have begun rereading some of the Oz books aloud to my kids. For Kid One (age 7), it's been almost five years since we read the early ones; for Kid Two (age 5), they haven't heard them at all.

One of the interesting things about reading the books aloud was how it cause me to see many of them in a different light based on Kid One's enjoyment of them, what they responded to—as well as what I responded to, when I was reading aloud instead of reading silently. Rereading is also interesting in this regard, because when I first read The Marvelous Land of Oz aloud,* I was reading it to a three-year-old, and now I'm reading it to two much older kids. So I've gone from reevaluating the books to rereevaluating them!

The Marvelous Land of Oz: Being an account of the further adventures of the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman and also the strange experiences of the Highly Magnified Woggle-Bug, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Animated Saw-Horse, and the Gump; the story being A Sequel to The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
illustrated by John R. Neill

Originally published: 1904
Acquired: July 2021
Previously read: August 2021
Read aloud: April–May 2026

So last time around, I complained about this one a lot: "I feel as though Baum was attempting to recapture the magic of the original book's Scarecrow–Tin Woodman–Cowardly Lion trio, but failing. [...] Tip occasionally has good ideas, but the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman are pretty useless; and new characters Jack Pumpkinhead and Woggle-Bug pretty much contribute nothing at all. Plus everyone becomes mean and is constantly sniping at each other!" But this bothered me a lot less this time around because I think my kids can appreciate funny banter at ages 5 and 7 that a kid aged 3 cannot. They thought Jack Pumpkinhead's constant fretting about ways he might die was funny; Kid One told me they really liked my Woggle-Bug voice; both kids had an appreciation for the Woggle-Bug's really terrible puns (particular highlights: the "squash" one, all the jokes about the Scarecrow being filled with money). All of this had gone over the head of Kid One five years ago.

Even though it has been a long time since we read this book, Kid One is familiar with the origins of Ozma from adaptations and such; Kid Two, however, did not know the true identity of Tip. (It was a feature of Paradox in Oz, but that was a long time ago for him, and probably all went over his head in any case.) So I put Kid One under strict instructions not to hint to Kid Two what was going to happen... and thankfully they listened! This paid off when it was revealed who Tip really was. Kid Two's mouth was literally agape! But there was a downside, too; when we finished the book, Kid Two was sad: "But I want there to be more books about Tip!"

Continuity note:
One of the fun upsides of having recently read the Ages of Oz prequels aloud to the kids is when they pick up on connections; Kid One was very excited when Glinda's lie-detecting pearl showed up in this book, which she acquired as a kid in A Dark Descent.

* I always think of this book as The Marvellous Land of Oz, though, because as a kid the copy I owned was a Puffin Classic, which used UK spellings. 

Reading L. Frank Baum's John Dough and the Cherub Aloud to My Kid

John Dough and the Cherub: A Whimsical Wonder-Story in which is Described the Marvelous Creation of John Dough, the Gingerbread Man; his meeting with the Incubator Baby called Chick the Cherub: their Adventures in the Isle of Phreex, the Land of Mifkets, Pirate Island and Hiland and Loland
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

My child and I used to slide the Nonestica "borderlands" novels (those books by L. Frank Baum about countries adjacent to Oz) in between Ruth Plumly Thompson "Famous Forty" installments when I had a delay in sourcing one. However, we have the whole Famous Forty now, so we haven't done that in quite some time; furthermore, we had just one left, John Dough and the Cherub, the only one I did not own when I myself was a kid.

Originally published: 1906
Acquired: July 2023
Read aloud: March–April 2024

But I realized that our next Famous Forty book, The Shaggy Man of Oz, includes a character Baum first introduced in this book; furthermore, we'd recently read The Scalawagons of Oz and will soon read The Ozmapolitan of Oz, both of which feature Mifkets, who made their debut here as well. So I decided we'd take a break from Jack Snow and read John Dough first. My kid was fascinated by John Dough the living gingerbread man back when he cameoed in The Road to Oz, but as that was over two years ago, of course they don't remember that anymore.

On the one hand, it's nice to be back with L. Frank Baum again. As much as I enjoy a lot of the later contributors to the Oz novels, there's something about Baum's particular mix of groundedness and whimsy that no one else quite gets right. Yes, fanciful things can happen in an L. Frank Baum novel, but one always feels they are happening in a real world, even if not your real world, there's something about them that feels carefully thought through and rational even at their most bizarre. Whereas at times it felt like Thompson or John R. Neill were willing to bring anything to life at the drop of a hat, Baum works hard to lay the foundation for why John Dough would come to life, and then explore how horrifying it would be to be a piece of living confectionery in a world of hungry humans. My kid is often sensitive to things or people being damaged or broken, so I expected them to not like all these threats of being eaten, but they took it with surprising equanimity most of the time.

After this, though, the book changes tack; J. L. Bell argues in the introduction that Baum probably wrote the early chapters a few years before the rest. In chapter five, John Dough is abruptly sent to a fantastic realm, the kind Baum had become famous for writing about, and encounters a child co-protagonist, Chick the Cherub, the genderless incubator baby. (On the rare occasion Baum uses pronouns for Chick, he uses "it," but I substituted the more modern singular "they.") Chick is surprisingly underexplained; I guess people in 1906 just knew what an incubator baby was, and would be willing to buy Baum's apparent assumption that a human child born to a genderless machine would itself be without gender? Chick is a fun concept the book does little with, but perhaps that's the point; my five-year-old child who sometimes insists they are both a boy and a girl was all too ready to accept a genderless child in an Oz book, and Chick's lack of gender goes almost entirely without comment. Chick is also a fun character, pushing against the often recalcitrant John Dough.

John Dough, Chick, and later Para Bruin the rubber bear travel from the Isle of Phreex to the Palace of Romance to the Isle of the Mifkets to Pirate Island to Hiland and Loland, all of them typical oddball Baum locales, with his usual vividly imagined characters... though by the time we get to the last two locations, it does kind of feel like we're running on empty, with little time spent and little fun to be had. Still, even the weaker locations are the kind that a kid can still find captivating.

The book also demonstrates the weaker aspects of Baum as a writer; it's very much one of his books where the characters go to a place, do a thing, go to another place, and so on. The pursuit of John Dough by "the Arab," Ali Dubh, who wants to eat him so that he can access the Elixir of Life John was baked with, provides some unity... but John himself almost never makes any interesting choices or comes up with any clever ideas. Basically, he and Chick just run away again and again and again until they end up in a place whose residents go, "Well, you're king now." The Palace of Romance incident probably displays the most initiative on the part of John and Chick, and all they do there is delay a bit and then run away! (I did like that incident, though; it's a bit darker than Baum's usual.)

My kid did not like a bit, late in the book, where John actually gets tied up and has a finger bitten off! On the other hand, they did advocate for the Princess of Mifket Island being allowed to eat a bit of John in order to restore her health, a dilemma on John's part that is curiously one-sided. Should John really be obligated to give a piece of himself to all worthy comers?

Overall, it's not one of Baum's best, but it is one of Baum's most fanciful—and kids like fancy. Even my three-year-old is starting to get in on the act, remembering characters and concepts from day to day. When we finished, I pulled out Road and we read the section where John Dough, Chick, and Para Bruin reappear there. Already a continuity fiend, my child demanded to know why we hadn't read John Dough first in its proper order! They asked if we couldn't reread all of Road now, but I demurred; we still have over a dozen Oz books to read before we start rereading any!

Next up in sequence: The Shaggy Man of Oz

Reading The Runaway in Oz Aloud to My Son

The Runaway in Oz by John R. Neill
edited and illustrated by Eric Shanower

There are a number of Oz books that some fans call "quasi-canonical"; that is to say, they have some sort of claim to official status, but they are not part of the "Famous Forty" (the novels from the original publisher(s) of the series). For many, it's that they were written by a Famous Forty author, but released by a different publisher. It has been my intention to incorporate those stories in me and my son's marathon through the Oz books—but where they ought to have been published, not where they were.

Originally published: 1995
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: January–February 2024

The Runaway in Oz was intended as the Oz book for 1943, but John R. Neill died before he finished editing the manuscript or even started doing the illustrations; the publisher opted to forego an Oz book for the year, and the next would not appear until 1946. In 1995, however, Books of Wonder finally published the book with the blessing of Neill's family, edited and illustrated by contemporary Oz superstar Eric Shanower. I opted to read this to my son following on from Lucky Bucky as if it was the Oz book for 1943. By the time we got to 1995, I am not so sure he would remember who, say, Jenny Jump was!

In some ways, this is probably the best of John R. Neill's four Oz books. In a comment on the late, lamented Tor.com, editor Eric Shanower says one of the things he did was "[t]ake out whatever made no sense"—in a John R. Neill book this could, of course, be quite a lot, and Runaway certainly has a cohesion lacking in, say, Wonder City or Scalawagons of Oz. It has two clear, parallel plots in the classic Baum/Thompson fashion, one about Scraps running away from the Emerald City and one about Jenny Jump, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the Wogglebug trying to find her. Yet it still has that John R. Neill fancifulness, with details such as the Wogglebug literally creating a castle in the air while he dreams—one he intends to use to take a vacation!

The best part of the book is probably the beginning, where Scraps antagonizes in turn Jellia Jamb, the Tin Woodman, and Jenny Jump. Convinced everyone is "mean" for simply telling her to behave herself, she resolves to run away. It's a very child-like, very accurate response, and it led to some good moments with my five-year-old, who likes to declare that I am mean whenever I enforce a rule or boundary, no matter how gently I do it. Were Jellia or Jenny being mean to Scraps, I asked? No, he declared. Hmmmm... Will this lesson sink in? Well, I am less sure about that.

You might think, then, that the book would end with Scraps learning to accept some responsibility for her actions, but this only kind of happens. There is a great scene where Scraps returns to the Emerald City, seemingly in prisoners' garb (a sheet, in a callback to Patchwork Girl), but I feel like an author who was not John R. Neill could have pulled things together a bit more strongly. I do like the somewhat Ozzy moral that sometimes it's right to run away, but it does seem to me that Scraps largely gets away without actually learning anything even if she does inadvertently face some consequences.

So the book was lively and focused, but not always totally successful at what it seemed like it was doing, if that makes sense. And while it certainly had a coherence lacking in Wonder City, Wonder City was so manic it almost gets away with its many faults, which isn't quite the case here.

Eric Shanower illustrates, and it's certainly a beautiful edition. Shanower's character designs are clearly influenced by Neill's, but he has a somewhat different style, with a tightness of line that makes the weirdness of what he's drawing seem more real. This being a Neill novel, there's a lot of fanciful imagery, and Shanower does a great job with it; probably my favorite was the army of quinces! The flat people were also pretty great. 

I could also detect (so I believe) a bit of fannishness in Shanower's editing. This is the first book to get east and west right since Ruth Plumly Thompson took over, and there's an extended passage of exposition reversing Jenny Jump's "lobotomy" from Wonder City. Actually, I very much enjoyed Shanower's Jenny, particularly all her costume and hairstyle changes. It's a shame Neill's work is still under copyright, because that means Jenny (and Number Nine) haven't been available to other authors, and they're strong characters I'd like to see in other Oz stories. I also like the continuing friendship between Scraps and Jack Pumpkinhead.

Things my son really did not like: the stressful sequence where the air castle disintegrates, Scraps being turned all black by the quinces. But on the whole, he reported enjoying this one. Both of us like the Patchwork Girl a lot, so perhaps we were destined to! Even the three-year-old is into her; whenever we read a chapter at bedtime, he would point to the cover and declare, "Scraps is rainbow. Scraps is rainbow!" A couple weeks later, I asked him if he remembered what color Scraps was and he said "Scraps is rainbow... but she turned black!" So the books are starting to sink in for him as well.

Next up in sequence: The Magical Mimics in Oz

Reading Lucky Bucky in Oz Aloud to My Son

Lucky Bucky in Oz by John R. Neill

In my write-ups of The Wonder City of Oz and Scalawagons of Oz, I argued that John R. Neill was doing something different to what L. Frank Baum and Ruth Plumly Thompson usually did; if we were to use Farah Mendlesohn's categories, Neill's first two books were more akin to immersive fantasies than the usual portal/quest fantasies of an Oz book. His third and (sort of) final Oz novel, however, sees him revert to a classic Oz formula: an American child comes to Oz and needs to journey to the Emerald City. Neill's implementation of this formula probably owes more to Thompson than to Baum; the explanation for the trip is far-fetched even by Oz standards (Lucky Bucky is on a tugboat whose boiler explodes, propelling him through the air all the way to the Nonentic [sic] Ocean) and he gains a faithful animal companion (in this case, a living wooden whale). Shades of Yellow Knight or Speedy, perhaps.

Originally published: 1942
Acquired: October 2023
Read aloud: December 2023–January 2024

The book starts quite promisingly. Bucky Jones lands on a volcanic island—one that belches out foodstuffs and is inhabited by bakers perennially under siege by pirates looking to steal their pies; that is to say, "pie-rates." The pirates are using the wooden whale Davy Jones as their base of operations, and soon they end up stranded on the island while Bucky ends up on the whale. Bucky wants to go home, and Davy (who assumes the two must be cousins) says their best bet is the journey to the Emerald City and ask Ozma. Davy must travel up and down rivers, over land, and even across the Deadly Desert to make this journey. Davy is a bit dour but faithful, Bucky is eternally optimistic. It's a good pairing and a classic formula.

Unfortunately, it's much like Thompson's work in another way; it's one of those books where nothing very interesting seems to happen on the journey. Bucky and Davy arrive somewhere, they leave, they arrive somewhere, they leave. There is very little actual danger and even less cleverness; the one time you might imagine them having to do something interesting (when an underground river takes them into the Nome Kingdom), they get bailed out by Number Nine (whose been monitoring their progress on the Wizard's tattle-scope) via the Ambassa-door. When they get to the Deadly Desert, Polychrome randomly shows up to use the rainbow to help them across, in a scene ripped straight out of Purple Prince. Indeed, the whole set-up of intriguing characters on an utterly forgettable journey comes is highly reminiscent of that book. By the time my son and I got to the end and looked at Bucky's journey on the Oz Club map, he couldn't remember what the Zerons they met in an early chapter were—and neither could I.

Meanwhile, in the Emerald City, Ozma initiates a very period-appropriate public works project, putting the people of the city to work painting Oz's history on the walls of her palace (or of the city itself, Neill seems to get them confused). The Wizard supplies magic paint, and Jack Pumpkinhead paints such a good picture of Mombi that the picture comes to life and flies off. Later, so do a bunch of other sorcerers and witches from Oz history (these all being original characters) and dozens of paintings of the Wizard. This is fun stuff, but ultimately goes nowhere. Mombi is pretty easily defeated, and even though she hides in Davy Jones, never actually threatens our heroes.

Still, in the usual Neill fashion, one has the sense of Oz as a bizarre place where anything can happen. When Davy Jones reaches the core of the Winkie Country, he finds the rivers abruptly end. This turns out to be because the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman had the Wizard get rid of them, because they were constantly falling in them! (Recalling, it seems, Little Wizard Stories, among others.) Weird things are always happening in Oz, even between books. There are flying bellows-birds, and a country of uncles (including the Uncle Sam, which confused my son, as he's just called Bucky's uncle, and he wanted to know how Bucky's uncle got there). We learn the Tin Woodman has six nieces, who all married tinsmiths; I want to know more about his extended family! We learn that there was a time when Ozma, Glinda, and the Wizard used to hunt witches together (between Dorothy and the Wizard and Road to Oz?), and that a sorcerer named Old Trickolas Om was the worst to ever bedevil them, besides Mombi herself; the exploits of many of these other witches and sorcerers are briefly detailed, and we even learn that many dark magicians inhabit the Winkie wilderness yet, assaulting innocent travelers. Wow. What I like about Neill is that he just goes for it... even when, admittedly, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

(There is some very bad internal continuity in this book; many events simply cannot happen in the sequence described.  At one point, Number Nine sees Davy Jones enter the Nome Kingdom and travels there to intervene. Then he returns to the Emerald City, and the painting of Mombi comes to life, and it takes refuge in Davy around the same time he and Bucky meet the Zerons... which happened before they went to the Nome Kingdom. Time travel? Wonder City received a massive edit... but on the other hand, Lucky Bucky didn't receive one it desperately needed.)

As always, though, my son enjoyed it immensely. The sheer exuberance of Neill's Oz is perfect for a five-year-old, and he really liked the ending, where the bakers' volcano is moved to a lake near the Emerald City, and Davy gets a job delivering its wares—plus, the Wizard uses the volcano to send up firework displays at night. Why not? 

Here's my son's picture of Lucky Bucky:

(I for one would have liked to have known why Bucky abruptly decides he'd rather live in Oz than go home. This book overall is better than Scalawagons for an adult reader... but still not up to much. Certainly reading it aloud is the way to go, though.)

Next up in sequence: The Runaway in Oz

Reading The Scalawagons of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Scalawagons of Oz by John R. Neill

Back when I wrote up Neill's first Oz book, I wrote that "the thing I like about more than anything else is that it might be the first Oz book to give us a sense of what it's like to live in Oz." From the author's note at the beginning of his second, one discovers that this was in fact his explicit intention:

Originally published: 1941
Acquired: October 2023
Read aloud: November–December 2023

Day by day stirring events happen in the Land of OZ which we are compelled to let pass. No one will ever know of them.
     It would be impossible to tell you all that happens in a whole year.
     This book is the record of less than a week.

Basically, strange things are constantly happening in Oz; it's not that the books we get annually are the only significant events, rather, they are but the tip of the iceberg. (This is a handy get out for seeming continuity errors, of course. Why is Ojo an elephant boy now? Why is Jack Pumpkinhead trying to make Scraps into a proper lady? Why is the Scarecrow ruler of the Munchkins? Well, presumably, very exciting adventures occupying the other fifty-one weeks of the year would answer all of these questions.) The people of Oz are constantly going through wacky adventures... and, of course, finding it all immensely fun. Wouldn't you, if you couldn't get hurt and you knew your fairy queen could sort out any real problem with her magic belt? Indeed, Scalawagons kind of provides an answer to a problem that plagued Ruth Plumly Thompson's novels, where Oz was always coming within moment of being conquered by honestly pretty pathetic outside forces. Why shouldn't Ozma let these folks get as far as they can get, when she know ultimately everything will turn out fine? If everyone everyone who's not her gets a chance to stop the villains, they get something to do!

The premise of Scalawagons is that the Wizard invents self-driving cars, which he calls "scalawagons," and sets up a factory to produce them on Carrot Mountain in the Quadling Country with Tik-Tok as superintendent. Unfortunately, a creature called the Bell-Snickle fills them up with flabbergas, making them do all kinds of crazy things and fly away, meaning the cars are no-shows at the party devoted to their reveal. Jenny Jump, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Sawhorse set out to recover them, but in the meantime the scalawagons have crossed the Deadly Desert and run into the Mifkits, a tribe of strange creatures from outside Oz. (The Mifkits are from Baum's non-Oz novel John Dough and the Cherub, though based on their location and the fact that they can throw their heads, Neill seems to be thinking of the Scoodlers from Road to Oz.)

Like Wonder City, the main sense this book gives is that we should wonder at the weirdness of Oz, for there's little actual danger or stakes. And we do get some fun stuff: the Lollies and their Pops, who are living lollipops; water fairies that can be used to clean floors; a living clock who torments people who are late to work; living medicine bottles that are so desperate to be used they'll break your leg so they can fix it; the Winkie Woods being a place that literally winks on and off; bell-men who are literally men with bells on their head, who fly through the air having lost their home of Boboland (from Rinkitink in Oz, clearly Neill was working from the map this time out); living forests that travel the countryside in search of water.

But though my son always seemed quite engaged (indeed, he rated the book four out of four stars), I found it often tedious and pointless. One feels like Jenny's attempt to find the scalawagons ought to be the spine of whole book, but Neill must have run out of ideas because she catches up to them about halfway through and bringing the wayward machines back home is remarkably easy. From there, a bunch of random small encounters pad out the book, such as a stray Mifkit (Scoodler?) popping up in Oz and being given gainful employment, and the return of the Bell-Snickle and its doomed attempt to capture the Emerald City of Oz with an army of trees. Two different chapters are made up of nothing more than the Sawhorse running dangerously fast for no real reason; at one point, the Tin Woodman freezes up and can't be saved because there is allegedly no oil in the whole Emerald City. A bunch of animals go on a rampage for the second book in a row.

The characters, especially in the second half of the book, keep telling each other how much fun they're having, Neill presumably hoping this will trick the reader into thinking they're having fun. As I alluded to above, Ozma doesn't intervene to stop the Bell-Snickle from attacking the Emerald City so that Dorothy, Trot, Betsy, Jellia, and Jenny can try to stop it... but they don't actually do anything, they just follow it around in their scalawagons.

And though Neill draws, as usual, some delightful images (the Soldier with the Green Whiskers holding the detached head of the Mifkit by the tongue was my favorite), I felt like there were fewer of them than in Wonder City. Altogether, the book is maybe a tad more coherent than Wonder City... which is probably to its detriment, as it was impossible to be bored reading Wonder City, but I was fairly often bored here.

But, like I said, my five-year-old son seemed to enjoy it throughout, so I guess Neill knew his target demographic. The only thing he didn't like was the Bell-Snickle's assault on the scalawagon factory. And, you know, I continue to be appreciative that Neill remembers many of Baum's characters that Thompson clearly forgot about, like Em and Henry, the Sawhorse, and Tik-Tok, while keeping hers in play too (Captain Salt and Sir Hokus both get a few good lines).

Next up in sequence: Lucky Bucky in Oz

Reading The Wonder City of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Wonder City of Oz by John R. Neill

After Ruth Plumly Thompson made her (sort of) last contribution to the Oz series with Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, publisher Reilly & Lee invited longtime illustrator John R. Neill to write the Oz book for 1940 himself. At that point, he had been illustrating Oz for thirty-six years—surely there was no one else more qualified?

Originally published: 1940
Acquired: ~1996?
Read aloud: October–November 2023

Well, the resulting book has a pretty terrible reputation. Everyone out there seems to dislike it; when I recently found the list of Oz books I had read as of 1997, I learned I had rated it the lowest of the Famous Forty. Even Reilly & Lee infamously disliked it, as upon receiving the manuscript, they tasked an editor to basically rewrite the whole thing. Eric Shanower informs us, "You have to read to at least chapter six of the published book before you reach a sentence that JRN actually wrote." As he admits, "Not that JRN’s original manuscript is any great shakes. It displays all the reason[s] that the editors at Reilly & Lee thought it needed an overhaul. However, I’m not sure it needed THIS overhaul."

But, perhaps this book more than any other shows the benefit of reading the Oz books aloud a chapter or two at a time to a five-year-old. Because when you do this, The Wonder City of Oz is hugely enjoyable!

The protagonist of Wonder City is Jenny Jump, a sixteen-year-old (I think) girl who lives by herself in New Jersey. She catches a leprechaun stealing her pepper cheese and transfixes him with her glare, which means he has to grant her a wish. She wishes to be turned into a fairy, but halfway through the process she blinks, meaning she's only half fairy (one fairy foot, one fairy eye, eight fairy fingers, and so on). When she stamps her fairy foot, she's propelled through the air to Oz, crashing down in the middle of Ozma's birthday parade. Soon, she's running a style shop and running in an "ozlection" to replace Ozma as ruler of Oz and helping fend off an invasion of shoe-eating sinister sponges from the Deadly Desert and going on an expedition to a chocolate star in an ozoplane with Jack Pumpkinhead and Scraps and much more.

Neill's Oz (or maybe his editor's Oz, but let's just say Neill's) is a weird, madcap place. If you're not careful, you can sew your mouth shut with magic thread; when you cry, your tears are candy; if you throw your cap into the air but forget to let go, you'll go up into the air with it; you might meet a voice that has lost his man; houses are alive enough to pick residents and battle each other and defend themselves from attack; you can train shoes to perform music; it's a legitimate worry that if someone wins an election in a landslide, the landslide could be strong enough to destroy a city. Though substantially more madcap, it does remind me a bit of the way things were back in the first book, before Baum had codified the rules of Oz so much and a Scarecrow could just come to life with no explanation. It's all the kind of thing that might annoy an older reader, but made my five-year-old cackle in delight.

The book technically has an overaching plot in the ozlection, but it's not really the point. It also has one in terms of Jenny's temper coming under control, though that one reads pretty badly to modern readers—first, the Wizard and the leprechaun conspire to de-age Jenny so that she's nicer (and regresses to before she obtained her fairy gifts), and then at the end, the Wizard removes a lot of Jenny's personality traits to make her nicer! The first intervention genuinely upset my son, and the second I edited out. He was also really upset when Jenny lost the ozlection (he really wanted her to beat Ozma!) but that nicely paralleled Jenny's own anger; she goes on a rampage and ends up releasing a bunch of ferocious plant-animals (e.g., tiger-lilies, foxgloves) on the city. I changed it so that seeing the results of her rampage caused Jenny to realize she had to manage her anger more productively—a lesson our five-year-old needs to learn, at least. (Though when I asked him, "do you ever get really angry when things don't go your way?" he claimed not!)

One of the weird things is that the Wizard suddenly has a penchant for disguises in this book; the commenters at the "Book of Common Focus" on Pumperdink point out that this is probably Neill being inspired by the MGM film of the previous year, where Frank Morgan plays several Emerald City characters, all of whom might be the Wizard in disguise. And it does kind of fit with things the Wizard does in Wonderful Wizard, Dorothy and the Wizard, and Little Wizard Stories. Here, he disguises himself as a customer at Jenny's style shop, as a broom man in Ozma's palace, and a doctor; seemingly, this is all to check out Number Nine, Jenny's Munchkin assistant who, by the time of the next book, is the Wizard's own assistant. That said, it comes across as a weird obsession; at one point he apologizes for not having enough time to put on a disguise, and when General Jinjur recognizes him, he teleports her back to her farm so she can't give him away.

Speaking of Jinjur, one of the delights of the book is that Neill (or his editor) seems to have remembered a lot of characters that Thompson either forgot about or abandoned. Jinjur has only a brief appearance but it's her first one since Tin Woodman, I think. We get dialogue for Uncle Henry and Aunt Em for the first time since Baum died. The Guardian of the Gates and the Wogglebug get a few meaningful scenes. We even get a pair of excellent scenes for Sir Hokus, Neill totally ignoring (wisely in my opinion) the really boring fate to which Thompson sentenced him in Yellow Knight. Here, he is just having fun chasing a two-headed dragon around the Emerald City, but he and the dragon pause their game to help Number Nine rid Jenny's style shop of an infestation of Nomes.

Of course, Neill always draws great pictures, but these are his best since the color plates were dropped, in my opinion. Clearly he starts from the pictures and then works out story events to justify them—and what better way could there be for him to work? How else would we ever get a two-page spread of Jack Pumpkinhead as conductor to a choir of shoes? I don't care how flimsy the justification is if I get to see pictures like this.

It's a wacky book, but probably the thing I like about more than anything else is that it might be the first Oz book to give us a sense of what it's like to live in Oz. Jenny travels to Oz, but beyond that, she doesn't do the usual Oz thing of questing somewhere. The whole book is set in or near the Emerald City, and just highlights the crazy, bizarre things that seemingly happen there on a daily basis. Life in Oz is a constant parade of delightful strangeness.

Next up in sequence: The Scalawagons of Oz

Reading Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz Aloud to My Son... and I Find My Childhood Oz Reading Log!

Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

Ruth Plumly Thompson's last few Oz books (the stretch from Speedy in Oz to Silver Princess) seemed to show her cutting free of Baum's world and restrictions, fully embracing Oz as a land of her creation, focusing on her original characters and exploring new plot structures—largely, I think, to her benefit. But this book, her last contribution to the "Famous Forty," very purposefully returns to Baum's world and characters.

Originally published: 1939
Acquired: ~1996?
Read aloud: September–October 2023

Was this because she knew it would be her last, a sort of farewell tour? I don't think so, because the author's note at the beginning seems to very strongly imply she will be back for the next one! Rather, it was 1939, and something happened in the world of Oz that year that would change it forever... just not in the books. It was the year of the MGM film, and of course Thompson's publisher would want to have a tie-in edition on the shelves.

But they couldn't! While Reilly & Lee held the publishing rights to every Oz book from Marvelous Land onward, the publishing rights to the original Wonderful Wizard were held by Bobbs-Merrill. So Thompson and her publisher instead came up with a book that would be a direct sequel to the first, focusing on the main characters of that book. At the beginning, the Wizard has planned a special dinner for all the people involved in Dorothy's first visit to Oz: himself and Dorothy, of course, but also the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion, Jellia Jamb (the Emerald City maid who takes care of Dorothy, though she goes unnamed until Marvelous Land), and the Soldier with the Green Whiskers. (The Guardian of the Gates is invited, but declines to leave the gates; there's no mention of other key characters from the first book like the Queen of the Field Mice or the leader of the Winged Monkeys.) 

I would assume Thompson and her publisher had no idea exactly who from the first book would end up on screen, but were trying to get what they thought would be prominent film characters front and center in the book. Additionally, you'll see on the cover how "THE WIZARD OF OZ" is written quite big while "OZOPLANING WITH" is in smaller type; from a distance, it looks like a book called The Wizard of Oz. You liked the movie, now read the book! Kind of, anyway.

But it's hard for me to imagine anyone picking up this book on the strength of the film and enjoying it. One problem is the characters Thompson chooses to focus on. She gives the principal roles (for the first half of the book, anyway) to Jellia Jamb, the Soldier with the Green Whiskers, and the Tin Woodman. They accidentally blast off on one of the Wizard's new ozoplanes, and the other characters try to catch up with them on the other one. I assume this is because Jellia and the Soldier had never been focal characters in the thirty-two previous Oz books, and though Baum had reused the Tin Woodman a lot, Thompson had never given him anything to do in her eighteen previous ones.

This leads to a number of problems. First and foremost, Jellia doesn't even make it into the film, and the Soldier is just barely in it. Second, Thompson seems unable to commit to Jellia as protagonist; while she leads the action in the first half of the book, she abruptly ceases to be the focal character in the second half, once the second group catches up, and the Wizard suddenly becomes the protagonist. Ideas seeded in the first half—Jellia being a maid forced to act the role of ruler—go nowhere.

Second, though Thompson writes a fun Soldier with the Green Whiskers (his obsession with pickles is an addition my five-year-old found hilarious), she forgets what little backstory Baum had given him. Though admittedly Baum doesn't state it outright, the character of Omby Amby in Ozma of Oz, Dorothy and the Wizard, and Emerald City is clearly meant to be the same person. But here, Thompson gives him the groanworthy name of Wantowin Battles! I changed it back to "Omby Amby" when reading aloud, though I did like the hints of backstory we get here: why would a Munchkin be a tall person with green facial hair? No wonder he left home and enlisted in the Wizard's army!

Third... is this the Tin Woodman? Thompson had not ever used him before—and reading this book, one is grateful she avoided the character so long. Thompson's Tin Woodman is an imperialist and a bully. The kindhearted man of the original novel is nowhere in evidence. It's impossible to imagine someone going from the movie (or the first book) to this one and recognizing him except in shape. (Thompson mostly calls him "Nick Chopper" in narration, causing my son to ask who that was. It's been so long since he's really been in a book, he'd forgotten his proper name! I then began editing it to "Tin Woodman" most of the time when reading aloud.)

But this is the plight of most of the characters from the original novel. The Scarecrow never does anything clever here, the Cowardly Lion has some good funny moments but never does anything brave. Worst of all, Dorothy just shrinks into the background rather than take charge as she usually does. And these are all characters that Thompson usually does well by! I don't know what happened, maybe the forced nature of this installment caused her to really phone it in, but the result is a book that totally fails to capture the magic of the one it's supposed to follow up. For me, at least, Thompson's final Famous Forty contribution is her worst book since her first one.

It has its moments; the assault of Strut of the Strat on the Emerald City is handled well, particularly the Tin Woodman's defiance of him; my son correctly guess what had happened to Ozma's safe when it seemingly exploded. The two deer characters are fun (though naming one "Shaggy" confused my son; does Thompson even remember the Shaggy Man?), and the Wizard does indeed get to be a bit clever. My son said he enjoyed it... though he was less likely to just ask to read more of it than he has been with the last few Oz books, and we sure dragged through the last few chapters especially.

Basically any of Thompson's previous five books would have made a better "finale" to her run than this one. That said, she later wrote two more Oz books, so we're not done with her yet. But before we get to those, we have the wares of John R. Neill, Jack Snow, and Rachel Cosgrove to sample...

* * *

As I have remarked around here before, I owned all of the Baum books as a kid, but only a few of Thompson's: just Silver Princess and Ozoplaning. What other Thompsons I read, I got through interlibrary loan. As I've reread them, though, nothing has really sparked a memory of reading them before, except I do remember "Ozamaland" from Captain Salt. So I've been wondering: which Thompsons did I actually read? All of them? Just some of them?

When cleaning out my office recently, I found the answer to this question. In a pile of papers dating back to the late 1990s, I found a printout of a spreadsheet I must have made circa 1997:

You'll see that it contains all of the Oz books I knew about then: most but not all of the Famous Forty (e.g., Merry Go Round in Oz is missing, though I did own that one as a kid; that must postdate this list), plus a couple quasicanonical ones (e.g., Runaway in Oz), "borderlands" books (e.g., Magical Monarch of Mo and Dot and Tot in Merryland), and many later continuation books, mostly those published by Books of Wonder (e.g., How the Wizard Came to Oz, The Glass Cat of Oz).

Plus, my own then-forthcoming magnum opus, The Bubble to Oz! I think I wrote the first two chapters of this; I wonder what happened to it. It was about my brother and sister traveling to Oz in a magic bubble like the ones from Road to Oz.

They're sorted chronologically, of course; the "Read" column indicates if I owned it ("O"), read it but didn't own it ("R"), or had no experience of it ("N"). From this, we can see that at the time I wrote the list, the Famous Forty books I had borrowed from the library were:

• The Royal Book of Oz
• Grampa in Oz
• The Purple Prince of Oz
• Ojo in Oz
• The Wishing Horse of Oz
• Captain Salt in Oz
• Handy Mandy in Oz
• The Magical Mimics in Oz
• The Shaggy Man of Oz
  

I would never have guessed. None of these books struck a chord of memory aside from Captain Salt. I guess this makes sense, as I read each one just the once... but still, I am surprised. I would never have thought I read Jack Snow's in particular!

I did find my childhood ratings pretty interesting. My 10/10 Oz books were:

• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
• The Emerald City of Oz
• The Patchwork Girl of Oz
• Rinkitink in Oz
• The Lost Princess of Oz
• The Magic of Oz
• Ojo in Oz 
• Handy Mandy in Oz
• Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz
• The Magical Mimics in Oz
• The Shaggy Man of Oz

Though I would still rate Wizard and Patchwork Girl highly, many of the other ones on this list do not hold up for me as an adult. Emerald City and Ozoplaning, really!? I guess I will soon see if Jack Snow's two books hold up.

On the other hand, the only "7" I gave to a Famous Forty novel was to the very next one we are reading... John R. Neill's Wonder City of Oz. Uh oh.

Next up in sequence: The Wonder City of Oz

Reading The Silver Princess in Oz Aloud to My Son

The Silver Princess in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

My son and I have come to Thompson's penultimate Oz novel in the "Famous Forty"; like many of her late novels, you get the sense that she's just doing whatever interests her. This, like Captain Salt in Oz, features no Baum characters. Sometimes fans complain about this, but I don't really buy the grounds for complaint. At this point, Thompson has written seventeen previous Oz novels—three more than Baum. Why should her characters be seen as less valid than his?

Originally published: 1938
Acquired: ~1996?
Read aloud: August 2023

The preexisting characters here are Kabumpo and Prince Randy. This is Kabumpo's fourth major appearance I think, and he's definitely a favorite in this household. Randy recurs from Purple Prince, though my son didn't seem to remember him very much even though it was only six months ago. I guess he is a fairly generic character. The two head out to visit their friend Jinnicky the Red Jinn of Ev and get into various escapades on the way, most notably encountering and befriending Princess Planetty, from Anuther Planet, and her Thunder Colt, Thun. That's right—the co-protagonist (and Randy's eventual love interest) is an alien! Fairly topical in the era of Orson Welles's The War of the Worlds, I suppose. The four make a good team; my son was in particular tickled by the various powers and peculiarities of Thun. Thompson always does well by horse characters (well, except for the OG Oz horse character). (To make it clear that "Anuther" was a proper noun and not just "another," I gave it a long u: "uh-NOO-ther." This seems unlikely to have been Thompson's intention, but I liked it better.)

Like most Thompson books the characters make their way through various weird enclaves, and then have to put a rightful ruler back on the throne. I felt the weird enclaves were a cut above average here, not like the forgettable ones of Purple Prince. I loved the idea of the Gapers, who concenrate all their sleeping into half the year, and then spend the other half of the year stretching out three long meals. I particularly enjoyed the Box Wood of Ix (the only appearance of Ix in a Famous Forty novel, fact fans), whose inhabitants live in boxes: after all, when you take something out of a box, it wears out or goes bad or breaks down, so if you never want to wear out or go bad or break down, stay in a box! It has a wonderful weird logic to it, like the best of the weird creatures of Oz. (If you are playing the "what Baum novel was Thompson slightly recycling" game, the answer this time is Patchwork Girl: like in that book, the main characters must burn their way through a tall fence which has a boxy creature inside it.)

When the characters actually get to Ev, it all goes a bit downhill. It turns out that Jinnicky has been usurped by one Gludwig the Glubrious... and so our heroes have to put down a slave rebellion! It's been a recurrent thing since Jinnicky was introduced back in Jack Pumpkinhead that he has "blacks" who work for him, who are sometimes called slaves. Following a suggestion I read somewhere online, I have been turning them into rock creatures who are Jinnicky's servants. As is so often the case, Thompson's racial politics are disturbingly regressive. Like how can someone in the 1930s think it's okay to write a book where the heroes put down a slave rebellion of black people? The slaves who rose up are in the wrong, Jinnicky the supposedly kind-hearted master is in the right. So I did a lot of amending here; I made them into servants formed of rock, like I said, and then when Jinnicky is restored, he agrees to better pay and working conditions for his servants.

Like in too many Thompson novels, it's a dull climax anyway. Randy just happens to free Ginger, the servant of Jinnicky's magic dinner bell; at the exact same time, Jinnicky just happens to be fished up from where Gludwig dumped him in the ocean; at the moment Jinnicky rings the bell, Randy, Ginger, Kabumpo, and Planetty just happen to be touching so they all get carried to where he is. Jinnicky then just magics them all back to Ev and defeats Gludwig in a second. It doesn't require our protagonists to do anything interesting or clever. (As is too often the case, Randy just happens to have picked up a magic tool earlier that protects him from harm.) I feel like almost every Thompson novel could go from good to great with a rewritten climax, though this one would need a pretty substantial rewrite.

I did like Nonagon Isle, the nine-sided island of misanthropic fishermen where Jinnicky washes up, that was fun. (And the existence of it and Octagon Isle taken together thus implies a whole set of polyhedral island in the Nonestic.)

In her introductory note, Thompson says of Gludwig, "With a name like that, we'd know he was a villain, wouldn't we?" And indeed (maybe because of that) my five-year-old insisted he didn't like it when anyone said "Gludwig the Glubrious." He was okay with it in the story, but if I would go "Gludwig the Glubrious" in any other context (and it's a fun name to say), he would scream, "I don't like that name! Stop!" He Who Must Not Be Named! The two-year-old is usually there when we read Oz these days, though he doesn't really follow it yet, and he was thus happy to start going "Gludwig the Glubrious Gludwig the Glubrious Gludwig the Glubrious" again and again much to the consternation of his brother.

Next up in sequence: Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz

Reading Handy Mandy in Oz Aloud to My Son

Handy Mandy in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

My son has been hyped up for Handy Mandy for a long time, entirely on the basis of its protagonist: a girl with seven arms from a place where everyone has seven arms. Two are skin, one is wood, one is iron, one is leather, and two are rubber, and she uses different hands for different jobs around the house. I liked Mandy (who gets nicknamed "Handy Mandy" upon her arrival in Oz) a lot; she's the kind of somewhat grotesque main character that Baum often went in for (e.g., the Tin Woodman, the Woggle-Bug) but that Thompson has largely eschewed in her own Oz work; moreover, she is Thompson's only original female protagonist, since she usually used Dorothy (plus one outing for Trot and one for Betsy) or an original male character. Mandy is good fun: hardworking and determined, but with an impetuous streak that often gets her into trouble. Her co-protagonist is Nox the Royal Ox, who is essentially cut from the same mold as Kabumpo, but Thompson always does well by her animal characters, so I didn't mind.

Originally published: 1937
Acquired: June 2022
Read aloud: July–August 2023

So Mandy is fun and Nox is fun, but the actual events of the novel made it one of Thompson's more mediocre outings. I have seen Eric Shanower complain that everyone says they like Purple Prince of Oz but no one who says so can actually remember anything about it beyond the main characters, and Handy Mandy has a similar problem. On their quest to find King Kerry, the lost boy kind of the minor Munchkin kingdom of Keretaria, Mandy and Nox encounter nothing of real interest or difficulty, though there is some fun stuff, such as one of Nox's horns turning out to be a "horn of plenty" which can generate whatever kind of stuff you might want in great volume.

Kerry turns out to be in the Silver Mountain, where the Wizard Wutz is collecting magical objects from across Oz prior to a takeover bid. (If I can play the game of "what Baum novel did Thompson reread before writing this one?", it seems to be Lost Princess.) Mandy and Nox luckily have one of those tools, a silver hammer that summons an elf named Himself (who Thompson also calls a dwarf). However, in classic Thompson fashion, the wrapup of the plot depends a lot on coincidence, and the silver hammer is so powerful that the protagonists don't really do anything interesting other than use it repeatedly.

The eventual explanation for all the doings of the magic hammer don't really make any sense, I think. It belonged to Wunchie, a witch of the west who used it to control the rulers of minor Munchkin kingdoms (Thompson always confusing east and west in Oz) up until two years ago. How do Ozma and Glinda not notice things like this!? Moreover, Wunchie used the hammer to depose the king of Keretaria and install Wutz's agent on the throne... but Wutz installed an agent on the throne of Keretaria in order to search the country for the silver hammer! The ending has all the hallmarks of Thompson making something up on the spot that doesn't accord with the details seeded earlier in the novel; surely the silver hammer was meant to be from the Silver Mountain and surely the "W" on it was meant to be for "Wutz," not the introduced-and-disposed-of-off-screen-in-the-literal-last-chapter Wunchie.

Wutz has an army of secret agents across Oz stealing magical artifacts; in addition to the one in Keretaria, we hear that another stole the Great Book of Records from Glinda, and we also see in flashback how another stole the Magic Picture and a jug that used to be Ruggedo (the deposed Nome King) from Ozma's palace. The agents all have numbers, and while reading it dawn on me that the book came out in 1937... and the late 1930s were the heyday of espionage thrillers about sinister agents plotting against England, with films like by Hitchcock and his imitators The 39 Steps, I Was a Spy, The Man Who Knew Too Much, On Secret Service, Sabotage, The Secret Agent, and The W Plan. I never thought I would read an Oz take on Hitchcock, but I think this is one—surely there is a Baum Bugle article in this, but probably better off written by someone who knows more about 1930s spy thrillers than I do! It's a bit weird thinking of Oz books as refract popular films of the time... but I imagine this happens more often than modern readers realize; the pop culture of the past no longer reads as pop culture to use a century on. And Captain Salt was Thompson's take on Kipling, so why not do Hitchcock next?

My son seemed to enjoy it, though. Thompson does lots of fun stuff with Mandy's seven hands that appeals to the imagination of a five-year-old, and when we finished the book he had lots of follow-up questions about the plot. (Not all of which I could answer satisfactorily. What was up with that magic flower?) I think he was a bit nervous when Wutz and Ruggedo stupefied the inhabitants of Ozma's palace and stole the Magic Belt, but later he told me it had no "bad parts." Also Neill provides a number of excellent two-page spreads, which compensates a bit for the loss of the color plates. It looks as good as it could given the constraints he was under by this point.

It is in the public domain, so I wonder if there are any fan follow-ups that take this fun character and put her into a more interesting plot. I have my own ideas...

Next up in sequence: The Silver Princess in Oz

Reading Captain Salt in Oz Aloud to My Son... and Two Years of Oz!

Captain Salt in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

With this book, my son and I move into Ruth Plumly Thompson's final four contributions to the "Famous Forty," none of which had color plates, and all of which have been republished by Books of Wonder in large paperbacks. I have to say, that even though a book with John R. Neill color plates is better than a book without them, it's much preferable to have his work reproduced at a larger size even when it is all black and white; the illustrations are so much more enjoyable to look at here than in the Del Rey and SeaWolf editions of the earlier Thompsons.

Originally published: 1936
Acquired: June 2022
Read aloud: June–July 2023

Though I know I read most or even all of the Thompson books as a kid, I typically have remembered nothing of them before rereading them to my son. But I did remember just one thing from this one: Ozamaland. I didn't remember anything about it, but I recognized that place name, and that as a kid it had tantalized me. What was this place that seemingly shared a name with Oz yet was so far from it?

Like the last few books by her, this has the feeling that Thompson is pushing out of the confines of the Oz structure and just doing what interests her. Specifically, this is a sequel to her own Pirates in Oz, following up on the adventures of Captain Samuel Salt of the Crescent Moon (formerly a pirate, now the Royal Explorer of Oz), ship's cook Ato (also part-time King of Octagon Isle), and Roger (Ato's Royal Read Bird). Together, the three (the Crescent Moon has been automated by the Red Jinn of Ev, so Salt need not rely on her unreliable former crew) set off to explore the unknown reaches of the Nonestic Ocean... and colonize it for Oz!?

Like a lot of Thompson's books, the politics are both pretty conservative and seemingly at odds with other Oz books. The book claims that Oz is getting too crowded—too many communities dotting the map, and too many princes who need places to rule—and thus the Crescent Moon is to bring new lands into Oz, putting them under the rule of Ozma. Whether these new lands want to be ruled appears to be somewhat besides the point, and the book reproduces a number of Orientalist tropes, portraying these lands as "new" and "undiscovered" even then they have their own inhabitants! But those people are, of course, just "natives."

There's not really another Oz book like it, though: none of the characters are from Oz, none step foot in the four countries of Oz during the novel's events, and no characters created by L. Frank Baum appear (which is I believe a first in the Oz books). The looser, aimless exploratory journey structure reminds me a bit of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), which was always my favorite of the Narnia books, and I found a lot to like here too. Thompson takes the Crescent Moon to a variety of new and interesting places: Lavaland Island with its volcanic inhabitants, Peakenspire Island made up entirely mountains and inhabited by yodelers, a giant sea forest, and so on. But like in Pirates, the novel benefits from the fact that being set on a ship means it can't have the frenetic pace of a lot of Thompson's Oz novels, with there actually being time to pause and reflect between each escapade. There's a lot of emphasis of the fauna that Samuel Salt collects, with lots of neat animals described and captured. Like in my favorite Oz novels, there are weird problems the characters must reason their way out of using their varied skills.

On one of their early trips, the Crescent Moon discovers in captivity on Patrippany Island, King Tazander Tazah of Ozamaland, who is being cared for by a friendly speaking hippopotamus named Nikobo. They liberate "Tandy" and bring him aboard, heading for Ozamaland, which Salt has heard of but no one has ever actually visited before. Tandy refers to himself as a "king and the son of a king's son" and is too proud to do any work aboard ship. But with some coaxing from Roger, he soon comes to enjoy sea life and learns to have fun. It's a fairly quick evolution, but it's also the only such evolution I can think of for an Oz protagonist, who usually end their novels much as they began. Tandy learns to be a better person, and when he returns to Ozamaland he is able to stand up for himself in a way he never did before—and unusually for a Thompson ruler, he just gets back on the Crescent Moon once the novel is over.

There's a very perceptive take on this novel I enjoyed from J. L. Bell hosted on Pumperdink; as he points out, it's basically Thompson's version of a Rudyard Kipling novel like Captains Courageous. But "[b]oth THE JUNGLE BOOK and CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS are about learning the rules of a society--of the jungle or a ship. In contrast, Roger's approach to educating Tandy is to FREE him from the rules he's been following all his life." Tandy learns to be helpful on the ship, especially thanks to his artistic ability, where he quickly sketches nature scenes for Captain Salt's log. But also the ending is different too:

Can Tandy keep from growing up further? I think the young heroes of both THE JUNGLE BOOK and CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS suffer through the death of one of their mentors, a major step toward maturity. Tandy doesn't have to do that. Though he lost his parents in infancy, he still has Nikobo, Salt, Ato, and Roger, and they seem to expect to live for hundreds more years. Thompson's version of Kipling's tales can thus have a uniquely Ozzy ending--a coming-of-age story in which no one actually has to come of age.

I think Bell encapsulates well why the arc of Tandy was one of my favorite parts of the book.

So if you can put the politics aside (and I can't blame you if you can't, because the story wouldn't exist without them), it's an enjoyable book. It seems to me with a little bit more self-awareness this could have all worked. Have Salt come to learn that though these places were all unknown to him, they weren't to their inhabitants, and have him realize that the Oz colonization plan was doomed. The set-up is right there, too, with the chapter about how Samuel Salt ends up a specimen in an underwater zoo, but it goes nowhere.

Like a lot of Thompson's work, it has the faint feel of being made up as she went along. Specifically, we are given a lot of details about Ozamaland early on that aren't really relevant to anything. It's on a continent called Tarara, sharing it with another country called Amaland; the people of Ozamaland wear white and are divided between the nobles who live in the White City and the "natives" who live in the jungles and deserts, while the people of Amaland wear gray. None of this matters in the end. One wonders if Thompson was setting up stuff she could use at the novel's end if the Crescent Moon made it to Ozamaland with fifty pages left to fill up, but then the Crescent Moon made it there with only twenty pages to fill up. I'd like to read a sequel that delved into all this a bit more—and why, as has tantalized me ever since I was a child, the name of the country has "Oz" in it. It seems to me there are some stories there. (There is a four-book fan series called The Royal Explorers of Oz that follows up on elements of this book, but I don't know if it explores what I am interested. Alas, at over $40 it's a bit of a plunge to take on the work of unknown-to-me authors.)

My son and I didn't move as quickly through this as our last couple, but he did seem pretty into it, especially the descriptions of many of the strange and unusual animals they encountered. When I asked him if he liked it, he said he liked all of the parts. (Unlike some other Oz books, there's not really any extended sequence of "bad things" happening to our protagonists, which is always what he complains about.) It was a good one to read aloud, though the early sections gave my throat quite a workout having to do a pirate voice, a pompous monarch voice, and a bird voice! I was very grateful when Tandy showed up.

(Many pedants like to point out that this book, despite the title, has no scenes set in Oz... but that's not true, because every island that the Crescent Moon visits is absorbed into Oz. Captain Salt is in Oz all the time!)

* * *

This book marks two years of reading Oz aloud to my son, who was not quite three when we started and is now not quite five. (I am writing this ten days before its posting date, which is a day before his birthday.) In the first year, we read an astounding twenty-three Oz books; this year we read sixteen more, which is not quite as fast but still pretty respectable. This covered books five through sixteen of Ruth Plumly Thompson's nineteen-book run, plus a four of Baum's "borderlands" books. All the Thompsons have essentially been new to me, so unlike the first year of this project, which was largely nostalgic, this has been one of discovery. I don't always like her choices, but almost all of them have been worth reading. The few borderlands books we did have been fun to revisit through a child's eyes; I have more appreciation of, say, Dot and Tot of Merryland and Queen Zixi of Ix now (though less for The Master Key and The Enchanted Island of Yew).

Though his interest ebbs and flows in its precise intensity, he seems as in to them as ever, and we have maintained a fairly consistent pace of late. The other day, he spent a morning drawing me a bunch of strange creatures that he said were from Oz, and indeed, they seemed pretty Ozzy.

It's funny; at this point his reading of the early books was so long ago he scarcely remembers them. Around the time we read Kabumpo in Oz, he told me that Dorothy, Ozma, Trot, and Betsy were his favorite characters; a month ago he did not remember who Trot and Betsy were! Once we get to the end we can go back to the beginning and it will all be new to him. I am looking forward to getting out of the Thompsons soon and discovering other flavors of post-Baum Oz, but I also know a lot of those books are more interested in the specific details of Baum which my son has totally forgotten!

Next up in sequence: Handy Mandy in Oz

Reading The Wishing Horse of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Wishing Horse of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

This is the last of the original "famous forty" Oz books published with color plates; nicely, it was published in a facsimile edition by the International Wizard of Oz Club in 1990 which the Oz Club still has copies of. As always, it looks great; Neill's work always looks exemplary at full size, and there's some fun stuff for him to draw here.

Originally published: 1935
Acquired: September 2022
Read aloud: June 2023

When writing up Speedy in Oz, I noted how Thompson's books often have analogues in Baum's, but Wishing Horse is different—it has no analogue in Baum's work as far as I can think of, and indeed, it seems to me that it must have been fairly unusual as a fantasy for the 1930s in general. Skamperoo, the king of Skampavia, a small poor country across the Deadly Desert from Oz, comes into the possession of magic wishing emeralds, and uses them to wish himself an amazing horse (the charger Chalk) and then to make himself emperor of Oz. But he's crafty (or rather, his advisors are), so he also wishes all the existing rulers and magic users of Oz disposed of, and he wishes that no one ever remember them. So Ozma, Glinda, the Tin Woodman, the kings and queens of the Munchkin and Gillikin countries, the Wizard of Oz, and even the visiting Red Jinn of Ev, are all gone in an instant, and no one remembers them—except Dorothy. You see, just before the spell takes effect, the beard of the Soldier with the Green Whiskers turns red, and Dorothy uses a wishing pill she happens to have in her pocket to make a wish that no matter what happens, she will be able to save Ozma and Oz. In classic Ruth Plumly Thompson fashion, this isn't really explained, but it seems to be that the Soldier's beard is somehow reacting with the magic of the wishing pills. (It's suggested that the beard is reacting to red magic, but we eventually learn that the wishing emeralds were formed with green magic, so who knows.)

What you get, though, is one of those classic sf&f stories where the universe is wrong, but only one person remembers: I think this is a combination of what TV Tropes would call "Backstory Invader" and "Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory." Dorothy realizes that Ozma and a lot of other people are missing... but no one other than her remembers them, not even the Scarecrow! My son did not like this, though he was also a bit confused—it's definitely a more complicated kind of magic spell than we usually see in Oz stories. The only person she can convince is Pigasus, the flying pig introduced in Pirates in Oz. Whoever sits on Pigasus's back speaks in verse, and this mental connection means that Pigasus can read Dorothy's mind and know that she is telling the truth. So Dorothy and Pigasus take off by themselves on a desperate mission to find some kind of assistance in restoring the proper history of Oz.

(It did sort of bug me that Dorothy doesn't even try to bring Toto with her; you think if anyone would believe Dorothy that Oz history had been changed even without evidence, it would be Toto.)

I don't think it has an analogue in another Oz book, but you can tell that Thompson probably reread both Wonderful Wizard and Road to Oz before writing it. The latter because Wishing Horse opens with basically the same kind of gigantic party and parade that closes Road. While I found it a bit annoying in Road, it's a clever way to open Wishing Horse. We see so many characters from previous books: along with the ones I already mentioned, we see High Boy, Notta Bit More, the Hungry Tiger, Sir Hokus, Prince Tatters, Kabumpo and the Royal Family of Pumperdink, Ojo and Unc Nunkie, King Ato and Roger, Tik-Tok, Scraps, Jack Pumpkinhead, Snif the Iffin, and many more. Because we see so much of how things are supposed to be, it's jarring when suddenly things are different. Thompson can be clever when she wants.

You can tell Thompson reread Wonderful Wizard because Wishing Horse is the first Oz book since the first to remember that the Good Witch of the North kissed Dorothy on her first trip to Oz in order to protect her. Exactly how this protection worked was a bit vague, and it never came up again; you might have assumed that it faded when Dorothy returned to Kansas at the end of the first book, given it never did anything for her again. But here it protects her from Gloma, the Black Witch of the East (who ought to be the Black Witch of the West, because Thompson always swaps the locations of the Munchkin and Winkie countries). Maybe the protection afforded by the Good Witch of the North only works against other witches? I don't think Dorothy was ever threatened by a witch specifically in all the intervening books. The whole encounter with Gloma and her people in the Black Forest was interesting; it's one of those rare threats that Thompson takes slowly and carefully, and I appreciated that. Like many Thompson communities, the denizens of the Black Forest transform their visitors to be like them, but they're not just a group of maniacs to be run away from, but rather potential friends to be won over in classic Dorothy fashion.

Anyway, on finding no one in Oz can help them, Dorothy and Pigasus travel to the Nome Kingdom, because King Kaliko has an army and politically owes his position of power to Oz intervention. Thompson always does well by Kaliko (and I always like reading his dialogue in a very obsequious voice), tricky but also careful not to overtly cross someone from Oz. Kaliko says he'll loan her an army... but only if she can come up with another army; Kaliko's wizard (the Nomes had a wizard in Tik-Tok, so clearly Thompson reread that too) also tells her that Ozma and all the other disappeared people are asleep submerged in Lightning Lake on Thunder Mountain, so Dorothy and Pigasus set off once again.

One often has the feeling that Thompson makes up her books as she goes along; she starts with a general sense of how that will end, but never goes back to the beginning to revise it to line up with the end more. Rarely has that been more clear to me than in Wishing Horse, where Dorothy and Pigasus never ever make it to Thunder Mountain; instead, they bump into a friendly seer, Bitty Bit of Some Summit, and he solves all their problems for them. So what had been a strong, engaging plot for most of its run suddenly fizzles out. Did Thompson not know how to handle Dorothy and Pigasus on Thunder Mountain?

With Bitty Bit, the two travel back to the Emerald City and corner Skamperoo and convince him to give up the emeralds. Again, it seems like things are going to explode at the climax but instead they kind of peter out, because by the time they get there, someone else has stolen the emeralds from Skamperoo! You might think this will complicate things, but in fact, a kitchen boy runs in with them, Pigasus grabs them, and then the kitchen boy runs away, all too easy. The complication is they still need to trust Skamperoo and Chalk to make the right wish to undo everything; in the book as written, it's Bitty Bit who makes this leap of trust, but I changed it to Dorothy as I read it aloud to my four-year-old son, which I think works better for a lot of character reasons. So kind of a disappointing ending to an otherwise strong book.

I will say that Skamperoo himself is one of the fun parts of the book; the narrator calls him a big baby early on, which my son thought was hilarious. He just wants to rule someplace nicer than Skampavia... though Skampavia would be nicer if he was a better ruler! Chalk is one of her typically strong horse characters; moral, but also loyal to his owner, even if his owner wants to do something wrong. I liked that at the end, they both reformed.

On the whole, as we come closer to the end of our run of Thompsons, you can see that she's kind of cutting loose a bit. Neither Speedy nor Wishing Horse are really like her other Oz books or, indeed, any Oz books. We have just six Thompsons to go (only four "canonical" ones), so I look forward to seeing what else she does next. My son reported enjoying this one, and I believe him—though as always he did not like the "bad parts," which in this case were when people didn't remember Ozma, and when Skamperoo was ruling Oz.

Some continuity thoughts: maybe Thompson didn't reread Road because she makes some mistakes about Merryland, Ix, and Noland, the three countries adjoining Skampavia. She says Merryland has a king (but it has a queen), that Zixi of Ix is friendly and pleasant (but she could be quite fierce), and that no one lives in Noland (sort of logical based on the name, but not the case). I edited all this as I read it.

Near the end of the book, we learn that the wishing emeralds were created by the Wizard Wam (an ancient Oz magic worker previously mentioned in Cowardly Lion) for the King of Green Mountain. My son suggested that "Green Mountain" could be an older name for "Big Enough Mountain," the big green mountain in the Quadling Country colonized by settlers from Emerald City in Speedy. Good idea, and I don't think there's anything in either book to contradict it.

Next up in sequence: Captain Salt in Oz