(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.

Reading Issue #3 of Oz-story Aloud to My Kids

As previously discussed here on this blog, I've been rereading some of the early L. Frank Baum Oz books aloud to my kids. So far, we've done The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Marvelous Land. But in between these, we've been working in some later "apocryphal" Oz books based on when they take place. So, for example, we read Donald Abbott's Speckled Rose between the first two because that's when it's set. In between Marvelous Land and Ozma, we read issue #3 of Oz-story Magazine because it contains the story "Ozma Sees Herself" by Edward Einhorn, which is set during that span; I also read the kids a couple other stories from the book I thought they would be interested in, and then read the rest of the book to myself.

Oz-story Magazine, Number Three
edited by David Maxine with Eric Shanower

Anthology published: 1997
Contents originally published: 1901-97
Acquired: May 2026
Read: May–July 2026

"Ozma Sees Herself" is set shortly after Marvelous Land, and concerns something L. Frank Baum himself was resolutely uninterested in: the psychological ramifications of Tip's transformation back into Ozma. It's pretty short, but like all of Einhorn's Oz work, well done. It also introduces Ozma to the Hungry Tiger; I was a bit surprised that Einhorn had the Tiger and the Cowardly Lion know each other from before Dorothy met the Lion, because I personally am a fan of the interpretation that the Tiger we see in Wonderful Wizard when the animals beg the Lion to kill the giant spider is the Hungry Tiger. But that's a quibble: the idea that Ozma sees a beautiful nymph and comes to recognize it as herself is a clever one.

The book also contains three installments from W. W. Denslow's newspaper strip that featured the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman. (Denslow and Baum shared copyright on the first book, and each made their own attempts to capitalize on the success of the stageplay adaptation of it; for Baum, that was Marvelous Land and its own stageplay adaptation, while for Denslow, it was a series of short stories he wrote and illustrated himself.) Denslow is an amazing illustrator, of course, but his writing does not really hit the tone of an Oz story. His work actually reminds me a lot of the next Oz-illustrator-turned-writer, John R. Neill—basically anything can happen if it gives Denslow an excuse to draw something interesting. For example, in these stories, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman can casually travel to America! Overall, they're pretty harmless and forgettable. If you care about timelines, they probably take place between Wonderful Wizard and Marvelous Land, except for the first one, which includes Dorothy. This is about her being sad because it's Christmas and she's away from her family; my understanding is that Oz timeline aficionados place it during Wonderful Wizard, in the segment after the Wizard has left Oz in his balloon, before the characters get the idea to go see Glinda for help. (Hungry Tiger Press later collected all of Denslow's stories in a book called The Scarecrow and the Tin-Man of Oz, which I own but have not read. Maybe someday I'll read it to the kids.)

This volume didn't contain as much kid-friendly material as some other installments of Oz-story; the only other thing I read aloud to the kids was "Spots in Oz" by Rachel Cosgrove Payes, which features the leopard with changing spots named Spots from The Hidden Valley of Oz. It was two years ago that we read this book, and it is honestly pretty forgettable, so Kid One has only a vague memory of Spots, and Kid Two doesn't know it at all. This story isn't much cop either, but it's fine. It also features the Hungry Tiger, so that lined up nicely with "Ozma Sees Herself" and our imminent rereading of Ozma of Oz.

There's some original comics material here, all written by Eric Shanower, with various illustrators (including himself); I particularly enjoyed "Poppies," a one-page conversation between Ozma and Dorothy about the poppies Ozma wears in her hair, with beautiful artwork by Ramona Fradon.

In terms of prose, ones I read to myself included "Buffalo Dream" by Jane Mailander, which was a reprint from an anthology of original sf&f. This is about a strange thing that happened to Oscar Diggs—the man later known as the Wizard—during his time as an itinerant circus performer in Nebraska. It's very different from an Oz story, but I really enjoyed it: a melancholy story about the last of the buffalo, told in the first person. "It was very long ago... and far stranger things have since happened to me." Reading it in this context, it's immediately obvious who the main character is, but it would have been fun to encounter it in the wild. 

There are a couple Baum reprints; the one of "The Glass Dog" from Animal Fairy Tales is fine. This issue's full-length novel is his The Flying Girl, originally published under the pseudonym Edith Van Dyne in 1911. The novel is about a brother and sister; she's seventeen and working as a secretary to help the family make ends meet, he's a recent engineering grad from Cornell who can only find employment in an automobile repair shop, but soon gets swept up in the mania for flying. He develops his own airplane, and the two must navigate the skullduggery of potential investors to support their invention... as you might guess from the title, she ends up being the one to fly it!

I found it a quick and charming read. I was surprised by some of the turns some of the characters take; Baum actually does a decent job avoiding what initially seem like some obvious directions. While Baum's main talent was surely in his fantasies, he was able to turn his hand to other genres quite successfully. In fact, though, I would say the book is clearly science fiction! It is about a new technology, one that's not real at the time the story was written, and the ramifications of it. If this isn't sf, then I don't know what it. 

I should also point out that while there is some surprise at the idea of a "flying girl," there no resistance. I bet if someone remade this book now, there'd be a bunch of misogynists going, "NO FE-MALE IS SUITABLE FOR FLYING!" In fact, we get the exact opposite from one of the characters: "The most successful aviators of the future... are bound to be women. As a rule they are lighter than men, more supple and active, quick of perception and less liable to lose their heads in emergencies. The operation of an aeroplane is, it seems to me, especially fitted to women."

Though, the same character goes on to make this prediction: "The airship of the future will not be a passenger affair... but an individual machine for personal use. They’ll be cheaper than automobiles, and more useful, for they can go direct to their destination in a straight 'airline.' Men will use them to go to business, women to visit town on shopping expeditions or to take an airing for pleasure; but I’m sure they will be built for but one person." Whoops!

Two other things of note. First, there's some discussion of mental illness and domestic abuse that really does not past muster in 2026, and made me very glad I did not elect to read the book aloud to my kids:

"He says that—that you abused his sister," doubtfully remarked the girl.
     "Well, I did," said Cumberford, calmly. "I pounded her two or three times. Once I choked her until it’s a wonder she ever revived."
     "Oh, how dreadful!" exclaimed Orissa, shrinking back.
     "Isn’t it?" he agreed, lighting a cigarette. "Only a brute would lift his hand against a woman. But Burthon's sister—my wife—had a fiendish temper, and her tantrums aroused all the evil in my nature—there's plenty there, I assure you. It was the time I choked her that Burthon had me arrested for cruelty. She had put poison in my coffee and I took the fluid into court with me. Burthon said I was lying and I asked him to drink the coffee to establish his sister’s innocence. But he wouldn’t. Pity, wasn’t it? The judge begged my pardon and said I ought to have choked her a moment longer. But no; I’m glad I didn’t, for she died naturally in the end. My dear daughter, whom I sincerely love, is like her lamented mother, except that I can trust her not to poison me."

Egads, I don't even know what to say about all that.

On the other hand, the "daughter" referred to in that passage, Sybil, very much reads as autistic to my 2026 eyes. Here's her first appearance:

As they went up the path Orissa, anxious to be sociable and to put the stranger at her ease, said brightly: "Don't you think the ride out here is beautiful?"
     "Yes," responded Sybil.
     "The orange groves are so attractive, just now," continued Orissa.
     There was no response.
     "I hope you enjoyed it, so you will be tempted to come again," resumed the little hostess.
     Miss Cumberford said nothing. Her father, a step in advance, remarked over his shoulder: "My daughter seldom wastes words. If you wish her to speak you must address to her a direct question; then she will answer it or not, as she pleases. It's her way, and you'll have to overlook it."

As the father of an autistic kid, this could be describing their approach to social interaction to a T!

Anyway, I was pretty into this. The sequel, The Flying Girl and Her Chum, was reprinted on its own by Hungry Tiger Press, so I'll probably end up picking it up at some point. (I gather the first book had minimal illustrations; it's been reillustrated here by Eric Shanower.) 

(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. 

(re)Reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Aloud to My Kids

As I have been reading all these apocryphal Oz books aloud to my kids, my wife keeps commenting that instead of reading them all these mediocre latter-day books, what I really ought to be doing is rereading some of the original ones. Kid Two, after all, was not even born yet when I read the original Baum novels, and even for Kid One, it was so long ago, they barely remember them. I felt like this had some merit—do I really want someone to remember, say, The Patchwork Bride of Oz moreso than Patchwork Girl?

I've been picking the apocryphal Oz books at random from a list I assembled; most recently, that lead me to The Speckled Rose of Oz by Donald Abbott, which takes place during the gap between Wonderful Wizard and Marvelous Land, when the Scarecrow rules the Emerald City. Well, this seemed like a clear enough reason to go back at last: reading a book set in a gap neither of my children recollected seemed pretty pointless! So I decided we'd reread Wonderful Wizard, then do Speckled Rose, then continue on into Marvelous Land.

Even though Kid One had Wonderful Wizard read aloud to them five years ago, they are still fairly familiar with its contents: they've heard the audiobook a couple times, read the Shanower/Young adaptation at least twice, and seen the MGM film. And Kid Two has seen the MGM film as well.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
illustrated by W. W. Denslow

Originally published: 1900
Acquired: January 2011
Previously read: umpteen times
Read aloud: March–April 2026

It was well worth rereading. First off, it's just very good. The book has been often imitated, even (especially?) by Baum himself, but rarely bettered. Maybe it's the nostalgia, but I think the book has a sort of joy and a pleasure in it that has very rarely been captured by other Oz books. The Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion are all at the most themselves: each possessing a singular virtue that they don't believe themselves to possess. Oz itself is a land of wonders and marvels, full of unknown dangers and extraordinary beauties. The characters' problem-solving skills are at their most important, because the landscape they move through is full of mysteries, and there are no convenient Magic Belts or wishing pills that can save them. To a degree, anything can happen. But also problems can be solved through the rational application of thought; I think Baum very much gets the pleasure of what China Miéville calls "rationalized alienation": this world works different from ours, but you can figure it out. Things don't differ arbitrarily; if you accept his starting premises of how a living scarecrow or man of tin would work, then what follows on them those ideas makes sense. So there is pleasure to, say, the Scarecrow and company working out how to get the Cowardly Lion out of the deadly poppy field. And this would be hard to get back to in a later book, where these characters are all "celebrities" and have very powerful friends.

Partially, though, I don't think the other books ever could capture what made this one work so well. I am thinking of what Brian W. Aldiss says in The Trillion Year Spree about the difference between the original Dune and its sequels, a difference he said was "perhaps true of most series novels in SF. The first novel derives much of its power from our delight in and discovery of a new environment. The pleasure of future volumes is different in kind. Familiarity and complexity replace the higher satisfaction of revelation" (398).

It was also worth doing because of the increased age of the kids. Unlike on previous reads, I think they got that the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion are intelligent, kind, and brave even before they see the Wizard... though also Kid One insisted that the Wizard must not be a humbug because he did give the threesome what they wanted, so I don't think they totally got how (at least as I think the first book makes clear, though later ones seemingly walked this back a bit) the gifts were nothing more than placebos. What Kid One did grok on this reading was the fact that much of what appears in the Emerald City is not actually green, and that the Wizard is just tricking everyone through the use of the green spectacles.

And of course the illustrations of this one are so good. We usually read a chapter or two before bedtime, and the kids listen in their beds, with me coming to show them any pictures. But the original book (which we of course read in its Books of Wonder facsimile edition) has pictures on almost every page, so I let the kids sit next to me as I read it. 

It was interesting reading the book shortly after the two Ages of Oz books by Gabriel Gale and Lisa Fiedler. Those are prequels to the original series, so I could see some of the connections a bit better... though also the account given by the Winged Monkeys of their history does not agree with what Gale and Fiedler added in in their books!

Reading L. Frank Baum's The Twinkle Tales Aloud to My Kids

The Twinkle Tales was a series of short stories published by L. Frank Baum in 1906 and 1907, originally as a series of small books, illustrated by Maginel Wright Enright (sister of Frank Lloyd Wright, fact fans!). The first six came out in 1906, and were later published as Twinkle and Chubbins: Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland. In 1907, Baum published a longer installment, Policeman Bluejay; Baum asked for a 1917 reprint of this to appear with the subtitle "An Oz Tale," though the publisher was not interested in this. All seven stories were not collected in a single volume until 2005, by University of Nebraska Press.

This I picked up from the library back when I was in grad school. I think this is possibly the only non-Oz Baum fantasy book I didn't read to my kid on our first run through the Oz books, because I assumed it was in the Oz Club's collection of L. Frank Baum's short stories, but it turns out that it is not. (Probably because the two books came out around the same time and had the same editor, and she didn't want the one to cannibalize the other.) Policeman Bluejay is also reprinted in issue #2 of Oz-story, but when I read the rest of that book to my kids, I didn't want to read it without having read the preceding Twinkle tales, so I purchased this and read it aloud to my kids.

The Twinkle Tales by L. Frank Baum
illustrated by Maginel Wright Enright

Collection published: 2005
Contents originally published: 1905-06
Acquired: February 2026
Read aloud: February–March 2026

Mostly, these stories focus on "Twinkle," a girl living in the prairie in the early twentieth century; in most, but not all, she's joined by her friend Chubbins. Mostly the stories revolved around animals: she visits a town of talking prairie dogs, talks to a woodchuck family, goes on an adventure with a mud-turtle prince, and so on. Some do that thing Baum loved to do and was very good at, which is extrapolate on what animals were actually like to imagine what they would be like if they could talk. We discover what it is to live as a prairie dog from Twinkle talking as the prairie dogs. Others are more fantastical, with the animals being more like generic fantasyland residents. There is a bit of an ecological strain here, with the animals often disliking how humans treat them. That, perhaps, is the most interesting achievement of the book, how it uses fantasy to reposition your perspective. The stories are sometimes framed as dreams, though that doesn't necessarily mean they didn't happen! There's no continuity between them, for Twinkle anyway; one would never know from one Twinkle story that she had already encountered magic in a different one.

One is barely about Twinkle: in "Bandit Jim Crow," she has a pet crow, but it escapes, and most of the story is about what it does away from her, in a forest governed by Policeman Bluejay. Policeman Bluejay reappears in the story of that title, where he actually does interact with Twinkle and Chubbins, who are turned into birds with human heads by a witch. This one has Baum's characteristic interest in weird forms of government; here, the birds of the forest have a hierarchy based on beauty.

Overall, reading them aloud to the kids, I found them cute but kind of ephemeral. They were into them well enough when we were reading them, particularly "Policeman Bluejay" ("dry water" was a hit), but it's hard for me to imagine that these will leave as lasting an impression on them as the Oz novels. (Fun fact: Twinkle knows about Dorothy because she has read the Oz books! As Baum originally published these books under a pseudonym, it's a bit of a sly joke on his part.)

Reading Issue #1 of Oz-story Aloud to My Kids

Oz-story Magazine ran for six years, collecting a mix of archival and original Oz and Oz-adjacent fiction and comic strips. It was published by Hungry Tiger Press, with editing by Hungry Tiger publisher David Maxine and art direction by his partner, Eric Shanower. It contains a number of pieces of Oz short fiction you can't find elsewhere, so I decided to incorporate it into the Oz books I've been reading my kids. Even though it's called a magazine, it's bound like a book and runs 128 pages and even has an ISBN.

Oz-story Magazine, Number One
edited by David Maxine
art director: Eric Shanower

Anthology published: 1995
Contents originally published: 1906-95
Acquired and read aloud: September 2025

The first issue contained four short stories that I read aloud to my kids. The first was "Percy and the Shrinking Violets" by Rachel Cosgrove Payes; this brings back Percy the giant white rat from her novels The Hidden Valley and Wicked Witch of Oz. Unfortunately, even though it was just over a year ago that we read these books, my seven-year-old did not remember Percy at all! The story, where Percy—and then later, Ozma—is shrunk by a magical violet is fun enough, though one feels like Ozma and Percy are a little slow on the uptake at times.

Before Ruth Plumly Thompson became an Oz writer, she published short tales of a kingdom called Pumperdink, which she revealed in Kabumpo in Oz was actually in the Gillikin Country. This volume collects one of those older stories, "The Dragon of Pumperdink," a fun story about a dragon running out of coal (Thompson's dragons die if their internal flame dies out) who needs to seek employment.

The longest short story in the book (I serialized it over three nights) is "Gugu and the Kalidahs" by Eric Shanower. This brings back Gugu the leopard from The Magic of Oz—given we read this back when my kid was three, no way did they remember Gugu! Thankfully, Kalidahs were memorable from their recent experiences of various adaptations of the original book (both the Shanower/Oz comic and the Yoto audio adaptation have gotten recent play), because otherwise there are no familiar Oz characters. The story is about how Gugu's forest gets invaded by Kalidahs, in violation of ancient treaty. and Gugu must do his best to push them out... alone. It's a tense, dark story; it's been a long time since I read The Jungle Book, but it felt like an Oz refraction of Kipling. The illustrations are not in Shanower's usual style, but they are striking.

Lastly, there's "The Balloon-Girl of Oz," credited to Stephen Kane, but actually by Eric Shanower. This focuses on my kids' eternal favorite, Scraps the Patchwork Girl, who here swells up like a balloon, and has to desperately make her way back to the Emerald City for help without floating off into space. I always like Oz stories that put the characters in a weird situation they must think through logically in order to solve, and of course pictures of Scraps looking like a balloon are going to be delightful. My kids were very much into the absurdity of this one. I particularly liked the ending, where Scraps gets to mad at all the people laughing at how funny she looks, so she just lets go and floats off into the sky!

In addition to all this, there's a couple comics; I read "The Pathetic Losers of Oz" by Ed Brubaker, about all the Oz residents with powers not worth mentioning. I did not read Walt Sprouse's comic adaptation of The Marvelous Land of Oz, but my comics-loving seven-year-old did.

Additionally, there's two stories I didn't read to the kids. One is a nice little piece of literary fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Outside the Cabinet-Makers," which mentions Mombi, so I guess Fitzgerald was a fan!

The other is a complete novel (over fifty pages of small type) by L. Frank Baum from 1906: Sam Steele's Adventures on Land and Sea, or The Boy Fortune Hunters in Alaska. This I read to myself after reading everything aloud to the kids. I think I made the right call there, I don't think they would have been into it, but I actually found it surprisingly fun, a boy's-own adventure about an orphan boy to enters into a partnership with his late father's business partner to hunt for gold in Alaska, but ends up finding a whole different adventure instead. (As David Maxine points out in the intro, despite the subtitle, there's only one boy fortune hunter and they never make it to Alaska!) Baum is good at putting people into tough situations they must work they way out of. Maybe once we get through all the issues of Oz-story, I'll seek out the other Sam Steele novels. (The novel was not illustrated originally, but cleverly, Shanower selects a bunch of John R. Neill illustrations from various other projects that work perfectly well; you never would have guessed!)

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

Taking the Racism Out of Roald Dahl, Oz, and James Bond?

The other day I was saying something about reading the Oz novels with my older son, and one of my friends asked what I thought about removing the racist content from Roald Dahl: L. Frank Baum and Ruth Plumly Thompson were no strangers to racist language in their books. Like Dahl's, it's usually more of a casual background element—as opposed to the really nasty stuff you might find in, say, the Frank Reade, Jr. dime novels.

There are of course a couple approaches to when a book gets old like this, and what was once generally acceptable becomes unacceptable. You can reprint it as it was, you can reprint it as it was but contextualize it or disclaim it, or you can edit it to remove what is offensive.

All three approaches have been taken in the case of the Oz novels: Dover has reprinted much of Baum's writing as is, with no amendments or editorializing; ditto Del Rey for Thompson's. On the other hand, when Books of Wonder reprinted Patchwork Girl of Oz, they took out some of the racist language and deleted one picture. The terribly named "Empty-Grave Retrofit" editions* of the Oz novels make similar adjustments to stories like Silver Princess, changing the black slaves of the Red Djinn into rock servants. Books of Wonder took the other approach too, appending a note to its reprint of Thompson's Royal Book indicating there was material modern readers would find offensive, but leaving the text unaltered.

In each case, the difference is one of market. Books of Wonder's reproductions of the Baum novels were targeting the library market and contemporary readers: these were editions intended to be given to current children. So it would make sense that the text would be edited. On the other hand, their Thompson editions are aimed at a market of Oz collectors, adults who want the original texts and can also understand the difference between 1923 and 2023.

And this is reflected in my own reading. When I read the Oz books to my son, I take out the racist content. Usually this just means a couple words here and there, but in the case of Royal Book, I had to skip over a two-page screed about Chinese food. I take out other stuff that doesn't fit with the moral ethos I want to project, too: in Lost King, the main characters killed Mombi, and I took that out! My wife has read our son a few Roald Dahls (both Charlie books, James and the Giant Peach, The B.F.G., and one other one, I think), and she made similar tweaks, I believe. If Son One ever reads the books on his own when he's older, we can talk about what he's reading—but I can have an informed conversation with him because I've read them all. A kid who picks up or is gifted Roald Dahl might not have that going for them.

There's something in here, of course, about what we think children's literature does and what it's for. It is okay for an adult to read a book with racism in it, but not a child. I probed at these attitudes back when I taught a class on children's literature. We praise The Outsiders because it doesn't filter things for its reader, it shows them the good and the bad and lets them decide. But then we turn around and say, no, when it comes to issues of race or gender, you ought to decide for the kids. I don't think this is a wrong distinction to make, but I think sometimes we are not honest with ourselves that, like the Victorians, we expect our literature for children to provide good moral instruction. It's just that we've changed our minds about what good moral instruction is.

The thing that's different about Oz versus Dahl is that for Oz, the original texts can continue to circulate alongside revised ones. This isn't true for Dahl, who remains under copyright. I think that his works will not enter into the public domain until 2060! Which is, frankly, an absurdly long amount of time. Over a century from publication to public domain for some of his works! Why? Back when the similar Dr. Seuss thing was going down, I read someone's take that the real problem here is that publishers and literary estates are able to extend control over the works of dead authors far too long. If we had good copyright laws, there would be amended Dahl books and original Dahl books. Parents and readers would have the same options they already do for Oz.

Now, okay, as for James Bond. If you read a James Bond, I would argue, the imperialism is the point. As I read through the original novels, it struck me how much Bond was always classifying, evaluating, and listing things. In all kinds of ways, but most often: women, race, and food. Everything gets organized and systematized. It's the sight of empire, it's what the James Bond books are for. If James Bond isn't going around making racist jokes while eating fried chicken in Harlem, he's some other character entirely. And when he's not doing that, he's battling to maintain Britain's colonial power across the globe. Oh, he's not being casually racist while trying to reinforce a violent global hegemony? Well, that's nice I guess. Like, go read some other spy novel if that's what you want! (Though... are there really any spy novels that aren't about this?)

* Seriously, what is up with that? It makes it sound like they're going to be Pride & Prejudice & Zombies–style retellings.

EDIT: I learned after I wrote this before it was published that Dahl's publishers backtracked, and they will keep the original texts in print as separate editions... I would not be surprised, however, if they quietly let them fall out of print. I also appreciated this Guardian column about how there's some stuff you just can't take out of James Bond without it all falling apart; the series is intrinsically built around ableism, for example.

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

Reading L. Frank Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix Aloud to My Son

Queen Zixi of Ix; or, the Story of the Magic Cloak
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by Frederick Richardson

My son and I tend to read "borderlands of Oz" books when we're stuck waiting for Oz books. Unfortunately, it took much longer than I expected to get The Hungry Tiger of Oz, and The Master Key alone was not enough to cover the gap. After not particularly enjoying Master Key or The Enchanted Island of Yew (which we had read to cover the gap between Grampa and Lost King), I wasn't looking forward to reading a third borderlands book in quick succession.

Originally published: 1904-05
Read aloud: July 2022

I only had two more borderlands book: Dot and Tot of Merryland (1901) and Queen Zixi of Ix (1904-05). I don't really remember either from my own childhood, but I knew Dot and Tot is short, but not considered to be very good, while Queen Zixi was longer, but many consider it one of Baum's best. Did I want to read a bad book and get back to Oz quickly? Or take longer to get back to Oz, but potentially enjoy the experience more? Eventually I decided I was tired of reading books I didn't enjoy very much, and picked Queen Zixi.

Queen Zixi was one of Baum's last attempts at a non-Oz fantasy, but you can tell by the title how he was attempting to cash in on Oz's success, with a country name not too far off Oz in form. Like some of Baum's other early work (e.g., Magical Monarch of Mo) it feels less American and less modern. It opens in the Forest of Burzee (previously established in Life and Adventures of Santa Claus), where a group of fairies under Queen Lulea weave a magic cloak that can grant a mortal bearer one wish; one fairy is then sent into the country of Noland to give it to someone sad.

Meanwhile, a pair of children named Timothy and Margaret (but usually called "Bud" and "Fluff") are orphaned, and travel with their Aunt Rivette to the capital city, Nole. There, the king of Noland has recently died without heir, meaning the forty-seventh person to come through the city's east gate will become the new monarch. On the way, Fluff is given the magic cloak and she wishes to be happy; Bud ends up being the forty-seventh person, making him king and Fluff princess. The book has three distinct parts: 1) Bud and Fluff becoming and settling into the roles in the palace, 2) Queen Zixi's attempts to steal the magic cloak from Princess Fluff, including war, and 3) the invasion of Noland by the strange Roly-Rogues.

I don't think Noland and Ix quite have the sparkle of Oz, they are pretty generic vaguely medieval magic kingdoms, but overall this book might be Baum's most successful non-Oz fantasy. Two ordinary children (I used country accents for both) becoming rulers of a country is fun idea. There's some good fantasy humor when the magic cloak is passed through the various denizens of the palace who, ignorant of its power, keep wishing for different things, meaning that Bud and Fluff's aunt gets wings, and the lord high general (who has a short man complex) ends up ten feet tall, and the lord high executioner obtains an extendable arm, and so on. This is pretty fun stuff, and it's nice to have protagonists for whom something is actually at stake—arguably the biggest difference between Baum's good fantasies (e.g., this, Oz, Sky Island) and his ones I have not enjoyed (e.g., Master Key, Yew, Sea Fairies).

Similar things go for Queen Zixi's attempts to capture the magic cloak and the invasion of the Roly-Rogues. The latter are nicely imaginative creatures, and they pose a real threat to Noland. Zixi is one of Baum's more interesting witch characters: she's given herself a long life and ruled wisely, but in a mirror, she looks her real 683 years, and thus when she hears of a magic cloak, wants to wish for being able to deceive mirrors, too. So the normally kind ruler becomes a harsher one, but by the end of the novel she learns her lesson.

(That said, like in a lot of Baum novels, there are a lot of hinted-at geopolitics. Zixi has lead her people in hundred of battles, and there is some kind of preexisting enmity between Noland and Ix that means Zixi can't just ask for the cloak. On the other hand, Zixi has never lost a battle, so surely all those hundred battles can't be against Noland. Later maps would place Ix between Noland and Ev, the country where Ozma takes place, so has Ix fought a number of wars with Ev? Or maybe Ix has faced sea raids from places like Regos and Coregos; this novel does establish that Ix has a merchant fleet of some kind. In my reading, I turned Queen Lulea into Queen Lurline, the fairy queen from Burzee mentioned in many Oz novels. It's interesting to note that this novel establishes that fairies have a dislike for witch magic, given how much in the Oz novels the fairy Ozma depends on the magic of Glinda, a witch.)

I think my son liked it; he was particularly into the comedy about what the people did with the cloak, while he as usual didn't like hearing about bad things like Zixi stealing the cloak. Overall, I enjoyed it. It doesn't quite have the sparkle of weirdness than an Oz novel does, but it's fun, it has good jokes, and if it doesn't have a unified plot, it does have three individual ones. Baum never returned to any of the lands he established in his non-Oz fantasies, and this is one of the rare times I wish he did. I'd like to see King Bud grow up a bit, and for him, Fluff, Aunt Rivette, Zixi, and their various advisors face down some other kind of threat—and this time with no magic cloak to help!

Next up in sequence: The Hungry Tiger of Oz

Reading L. Frank Baum's The Master Key Aloud to My Son

The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale, Founded Upon The Mysteries Of Electricity And The Optimism Of Its Devotees. It Was Written For Boys, But Others May Read It
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by Nick Bruel

After we finished The Lost King of Oz, my son and I once again hit a gap; our copy of The Hungry Tiger of Oz hadn't even been shipped yet. So I showed him my three remaining non-Oz fantasies by Baum, and he picked this one.

Originally published: 1901
Previously reread: April 2009
Read aloud: July 2022

Unlike all of Baum's other fantasies, this is not what Farah Mendelsohn would call a portal-quest fantasy, but an intrusion fantasy: the protagonist does not travel through a magical world, but instead, magic intrudes into our world. A boy named Rob accidentally assembles a complicated electrical circuit that strikes the "master key," summoning the Demon of Electricity, who grants him three electrical devices a week for three weeks, which he's supposed to use to reveal the powers of electricity to the world. One of them is a machine that uses electrical currents to let him fly, and so Rob makes a couple journeys around the Earth, and gets into various shenanigans and dangers.

As a result, it's Baum's only fantasy novel that actually does not link into the Oz expanded universe (though the Demon of Electricity here has some ideas in common with Electra, the maiden of electric light, in Tik-Tok of Oz). With all the other non-Oz books, I've very carefully emphasized their links to Oz, which is usually easy to do if the countries in question appear on the International Wizard of Oz Club map of the Oz continent, or if the characters have appeared in the Oz books. But here there is actually no such link.

On top of this, one of the places Rob visits is an island of cannibals off the coast of Africa. My edition is a reillustrated Books of Wonder one from the 1990s, and thus not visually offensive (Nick Bruel draws the cannibals like comedy cavemen, and gives them fair skin), but still the text is unaltered.

So I decided to solve two problems at once: I changed the island into a magical one "near Regos and Coregos in the Nonestic Ocean" (causing my son to excitedly exclaim, "I know that place!"), and the islanders into magical creatures that eat humans.

Still, this is just a small incident of a couple chapters in a much longer book, and as we were nearing its end, my son asked when Rob was going to "visit a country near Oz," and seemed unsatisfied when I pointed out he already had. I don't think he found Rob's real-world adventures very compelling: foiling monarchist plots in republican France by giving secret information to the president just isn't the thing to spark the enthusiasm of a three-year-old boy in the year 2022.

Overall, in fact, it's a pretty downbeat book, and it has the purposeless that's common in many of Baum's early non-Oz fantasies, like Enchanted Island of Yew. Rob has no real reason to go adventuring, and most of his problems are self-inflicted; a multi-chapter incident where he ended up involved in a Turk/Tatar battle in the city of Yarkand (in western China) would not have happened if he hadn't made the mistake of falling asleep in the open and consequently getting robbed.* Also like Baum's early non-Oz fantasies (Enchanted Island again, and also King Rinkitink), it's much more violent than the Oz books, with clashing armies killing one another, and I found it unpleasant.

I once wrote and presented a paper on this book, and though it's interesting in many ways, I don't think it's anywhere near as strong as the Oz books, or even as most of Baum's other fantasies, and more of it went over the head of my son than in the other Oz/Baum books we've read recently. This had me dreading the fact that when our next Oz book still hadn't arrived by the time we finished it, that we would have to read two non-Oz books in a row, but more on that next time...

I did generally like Nick Bruel's illustrations; simple stuff, but generally effective. Clear, dark lines, and a good sense of design. He dramatizes some of the more exciting moments very well.

Next up in sequence: Queen Zixi of Ix

* I did think about changing the Turks into Mudgers, and then the Tatars into some other residents of Oz, but this seemed like it might make things a bit too complicated for me to keep track of on the fly, and as if it would raise more questions than I could answer.

Reading L. Frank Baum's The Enchanted Island of Yew Aloud to My Son

The Enchanted Island of Yew by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by George O'Connor

By the time my three-year-old and I had finished Grampa in Oz, our copy of The Lost King of Oz was still a few days away, so I pulled out my four remaining non-Oz fantasies by Baum and asked him which one he wanted to read, and he picked this one, and we made our way through it while we waited.

Originally published: 1903
Acquired: ???
Read aloud: July 2022

Yew was added to the map of the countries near Oz by the International Wizard of Oz Club, but my memory of the book was that Baum made no explicit connection between it and his other fantasy milieu; no one from Yew, for example, attends Ozma's birthday party in The Road to Oz. But my memory was wrong. The book uses ryls and knooks, immortal forest creatures that Baum most prominently used in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, and the book even indirectly mentions Santa Claus when a fairy says that only one mortal has ever been made into an immortal. So it connects to Life and Adventures at least, and Baum made explicit links between that and his Oz mythos.

(I wonder if it was a fortuitous coincidence or a purposeful reference, that in this book, a fairy cannot be turned invisible by a magic mirror, and that in Lost Princess, the Wizard says fairies cannot be turned invisible against their wills. On the other hand, it was jarring to read this book's statement that humans can't be turned into fairies right after Grampa, where a human is transformed into a flower fairy.)

Anyway, this is about a fairy who requests that a mortal girl transform her into a mortal boy for one year so that she can go on adventures. If it wasn't for the fact that it was written and published after Wonderful Wizard, it would read like a dry run for it: Yew is segmented into five countries, one for each compass point with one in the center. "Prince Marvel" even meets an ordinary man who rules by pretending to be a wizard. But what worked in Wizard seemed to me less effective here. Dorothy's adventures in Wonderful Wizard are strung together by her wanting to get home, and Baum's better Oz books have a similar thread holding them together. Prince Marvel goes some interesting places—I liked King Terribus of Spor, and the Hidden Kingdom of Twi, where everything exists twice over, is surely one of his best executed magical communities—but his motivation is to just... have adventures. As a character, Marvel falls flat. You could do something interesting with the idea of an immortal fairy having to learn how to cope as a mere mortal, but in fact, Marvel only solves two problems without drawing on fairy powers. Throughout the rest of the book, he casts spells, or calls on ryls and knooks and goblins for assistance, or depends on his fairy immunity to others' magic, which seems to undermine the whole idea of the book.

I also felt like Baum was making this up as he went along, and his pacing rather got away from him. The book has twenty-seven chapters, and by the end of the nineteenth, Prince Marvel has got out of the second of Yew's five countries, meaning the last three countries must be covered in just eight chapters! So the book's problems get easier to solve, instead of harder, and Marvel amasses a large group of travelers around himself, most of whom do nothing.

Like Rinkitink (which was originally drafted around this time, too), you can also see the Baum's tone is different here than he would later adopt in the Oz books. There's a lot more physical jeopardy than in the Oz novels, but more than that, even the hero goes around threatening to hang and flog people! When Prince Marvel defeats a band of thieves, he even has them up in nooses, ready to hang, before they convince him to change his mind, and later on, he really does flog the imposter sorcerer Kwytoffle. (It's weirdly harsh compared to how the Wizard was treated in Wonderful Wizard for doing the exact same thing!) Some of it I edited out, but thankfully my son just doesn't really know what "hanging" or "flogging" mean. Indeed, he reacted more strongly to the idea that Kwytoffle might turn our heroes into grasshoppers and June-bugs! I also had to edit out some racism around a "blackamoor" that Marvel wrestles.

detail of the Oz Club map showing Yew in relation to Oz

Still, there's stuff to like here. Twi, like I said, is one of Baum's best developed magical communities, one of those ones where he really builds a world out of a funny idea. But my favorite segment of the book was Prince Marvel's encounter with Wul-Takim, the king of thieves. When Marvel is going to hang Wul-Takim, the erstwhile king of thieves claims he's reformed, and since Marvel promised to hang fifty-nine thieves but they are thieves no longer, he can't hang them. And then Wul-Takim asks Marvel what he's going to do with the thieves' treasure, Marvel tells him he's going to give it to the poor; Wul-Takim points out that as Marvel has taken all their stuff, they are in fact the poorest people on the island of Yew! It marks Wul-Takim as a fun character, and I was glad he continued to aid Marvel periodically throughout the book.

I also really liked Nerle, Marvel's squire, the son of a baron who has been so accustomed to his every desire being fulfilled, that his greatest joy is in suffering and deprivation. It's a shame that these two characters don't inhabit a stronger novel, but they definitely enlivened this one. And reading the blustering Kwytoffle's dialogue aloud was pretty enjoyable.

Like I said, Baum never referred to Yew in his Oz works, and to my knowledge, neither did any of the other "Famous Forty" authors. This is probably because of the coda, which establishes that a hundred years after the time of the novel, Yew had been civilized, and thus was no longer a place of magic. This isn't really consistent with what emerged in the later Oz novels, that Oz was part of a larger collection of magic lands, but it is consistent with how Oz is presented in Wonderful Wizard and Marvelous Land, as a place quite close to the United States (hidden in the American West somewhere?) that is magical because it hasn't been "civilized" yet.

My edition is a Books of Wonder one from the 1990s. The book was originally published with illustrations and color plates by the highly regarded Fanny Cory, but these would have been uneconomic for Books of Wonder to reproduce, so the book was reillustrated by George O'Connor. They're perfectly fine illustrations, but nothing very memorable. However, he went on to be a New York Times–bestselling, award-winning illustrator of picture books and YA graphic novels a decade later. His Wikipedia page doesn't even mention Enchanted Island, which I think was his first published work.

Next up in sequence: The Lost King of Oz

Reading L. Frank Baum's The Magical Monarch of Mo Aloud to My Son... and We Map the Oz Continent!

The Surprising Adventures of The Magical Monarch of Mo And His People
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by Frank Ver Beck

L. Frank Baum wrote a number of different fantasies early in his career, before the runaway success of Oz (more down to the stage show) made it the one he came back to again and again. In what many cynically regard as an attempt to boost sales of those other books, he referenced many of them in The Road to Oz by having the rulers of the fairylands from them attend Ozma's birthday party. However, The Magical Monarch of Mo was not one of those.

Originally published: 1899
Acquired: ???
Read aloud: June 2022

This book was originally written under the title The King of Phunnyland and published as A New Wonderland in 1899, referencing Lewis Carroll. The book didn't sell too well to my knowledge, but after the success of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum and his publisher changed the title to The Magical Monarch of Mo and edited all occurrences of "Phunnyland" in the book to "Mo." Flip the "WW" of "Wonderful Wizard" upside down and you get the  "MM" of "Magical Monarch"! Phunnyland had actually been mentioned in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, bringing it into Baum's extended fantasy universe (when I read that one aloud to my son, I edited it to be "Mo"), but Baum linked it more directly to Oz later on. The Wise Donkey of Mo has a small appearance in Patchwork Girl, and Trot and Cap'n Bill visit Mo in Scarecrow of Oz.

It was this last reference that captured my son's imagination, as it established that in Mo, it rains lemonade and snows popcorn. Since then, he's asked us again and again about other weather phenomena in Mo. So, when we finished Royal Book so quickly that our copy of Kabumpo in Oz hadn't arrived yet, I suggested we read The Magical Monarch of Mo (rereleased with a comprehensive set of illustrations, complete with color plates, by Dover in 1968) while we waited for it, and he eagerly agreed. So if sales was why Baum did it, it worked on us. (Well, except that I've owned my copy since childhood.)

Magical Monarch isn't really a novel; it's more a set of fourteen short stories. Some are about the unnamed King of Mo; others are about his various children. They're usually comedic in tone, and use a kind of cartoon logic. The king loses his head to a Purple Dragon and tries various replacements; members of the royal family get trapped at the bottom of a lake of syrup; a prince gets smooshed flat by a giant's clotheswringer; a neighboring country attacks Mo with a mechanical giant; an evil wizard steals a princess's toe. Some are riffs on fairy tale structures (people going on dangerous journeys where things happen in groups of three), others are just short funny things. Many have ideas Baum would come back later in his career and integrate into Oz: people made up of parts of multiple people, mechanical men, immortality, odd objects growing on trees.

Some are better than others; some worked for my three-year-old son, and some went over his head. Mostly, I think, he delighted in the details about Mo: animal crackers growing on trees, cows that make ice cream, lakes of syrup, rivers of cream with strawberries. Some of the jokes are good for his age; others went over his head. (A fox with a sore throat cuts it out and hangs it in the sun to "cure" it, then puts it back. It's not like my son knows that meaning of the word "cure!") But he seemed to have a good time, and often repeated to his mother strange things he learned about the Land of Mo. He still occasionally asks me if ice cream comes out of cows in Oz, too.

Before we had even read it, he had illustrated the country based on its appearance in Scarecrow:

That's the Bumpy Man (the Mo character from Scarecrow) in his castle (the castle being my son's own invention).

While reading Magical Monarch, he asked where it was in relation to Oz, so I pulled up a picture of the International Wizard of Oz Club map of the Oz continent on my computer. (Mo doesn't appear on the continent map in the Tik-Tok endpapers.) This lead, of course, to a demand that we draw it ourselves, so I taped together four sheets of paper and this is what we came up with:

In some spots, he insisted I draw what was on the official map; in others, he came up with his own countries. So the countries of Aj, Bikker, Hedgehogboogi, Lotsoflands, Kook, and Makkafook are his. I named Aj (based on my theory that there must be an A and U country if there's an Ev, an Ix, and an Oz), but he named all the others, and drew many of them. He asked me where the yellow brick roads go, and I showed him where to draw the official ones in the Munchkin and Gillikin countries, but he thought the other quadrants of Oz deserved their own... though he never got around to doing the Winkie one (not that you would be able to see it if he had). He also drew one to connect Aj to Hedgehogboogi because the two countries are friends, and all the rivers are his work. He tried to get me to draw every island on the official map, but I put my foot down on that one!

It now hangs in a place of pride in our dining room, though he pointed out to me that it's too high up for him to touch it when he wants to ask me questions.

Next up in sequence: Kabumpo in Oz