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

Reading The Royal Book of Oz Aloud to My Son... and He Makes My Wife Make a Map!

The Royal Book of Oz: In which the Scarecrow goes to search for his family tree and discovers that he is the Long Lost Emperor of the Silver Island, and how he was rescued and brought back to Oz by Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion
by L. Frank Baum, enlarged and edited by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

The title page of my Dover edition indicates that this book is by L. Frank Baum, just "enlarged and edited" by Ruth Plumly Thompson; this is backed up by the foreword by Baum's widow. This is all a lie; Baum left no notes on what a fifteenth Oz novel might be about. The publishers concocted this fiction—with Baum's own wife in on it—in order to ease the transition into Thompson's authorship. She would go on to write eighteen more canonical Oz novels, plus two "quasi-canonical" ones, so she actually wrote more about Oz than Baum. I'll talk more about my childhood experience of these in a future entry, as this one I actually reread a few years ago, so it's the only Thompson novel I have real concrete memories of.

Originally published: 1921
Acquired: December 2009
Previously read: December 2016
Read aloud: June 2022

So how is it when a new author takes over? Actually, the first chapter gives a very strong impression. It opens with the Woggle-Bug interrupting a party at Ozma's palace in the Emerald City, which gives Thompson an excuse to assemble many of the characters, and you can tell she's done her homework, as this chapter mentions many small details about each of the characters—details that in some cases Baum himself hadn't mentioned for a long time, and I rather suspect he had forgotten! The Woggle-Bug has often been mentioned in Baum's books, but I think this is the first one he actually had dialogue in since his introduction in Marvelous Land, and I found I had forgotten my voice for him. Thompson clearly read the entire series in preparation for taking over. (Or reread? Thompson was born in 1891, meaning she would have been just nine when Wonderful Wizard came out, right in the target age group.) Then, when the Scarecrow travels to the Munchkin Country to visit the beanpole Dorothy plucked him off, you can tell from the details Thompson mentions that she was working with the Tik-Tok end paper maps.

Like some of Baum's later books, Thompson's novel has two distinct plots in parallel. The first is about the Scarecrow's attempt to discover if he has a family tree: he slides down that beanpole to the subterranean kingdom of the Silver Islands, whose inhabitants tell him he is the reincarnation of their lost emperor.

It is astonishingly racist. Baum was sometimes inspired by real ethnic groups when creating Oz tribes, but it's textual here: the Scarecrow recognizes the Silver Islanders as looking Chinese because he's read about them in one of Dorothy's books. They are described as ugly, they all act awful, the illustrations are racial caricatures. In reading it aloud to my three-year-old son, I removed all explicit references to the Chinese, and tried to tone down some of the other rhetoric, making them into just another make-believe fairyland people. I always edit the books mildly on the fly—often for vocabulary, sometimes for continuity—but here I found myself for the first time just skipping an entire two-page section where the Scarecrow enumerated what was so disgusting about Silver Islander food. Like, he doesn't even eat, why would he care about this? I didn't remember it being so bad, but of course when you are reading aloud, you are forced to confront every single word of the text in a way that might not be true otherwise, where you can skim about. The plotline isn't particularly entertaining otherwise; I think my son had trouble following the reincarnation stuff and the political stuff. The Scarecrow doesn't do any interesting adventuring; he just complains about being emperor a lot.

This is a shame, because the other plot line is really successful in being Ozzy. Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion go to look for the Scarecrow, but thinking he went to his home in the Winkie Country, end up getting lost there. They encounter the city of Pokes, home to the Slow Pokes, where everyone moves so slowly they fall asleep all the time, and where an English knight, Sir Hokus, has been held captive since Arthur's time. Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, and Sir Hokus move from adventure to adventure, and they make a great trio.

Thompson has a good handle on Dorothy's mix of boldness and common sense. Rereading the series, I've had the feeling that Baum didn't really like the Cowardly Lion as much as the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, because he barely used him after the first book, unlike the others. Here, the Cowardly Lion has more to do than in the preceding thirteen novels combined, and Thompson gets his characterization note perfect. I really enjoyed Sir Hokus, the pompous, ineffectual knight who comes through when it matters. He's a fun character to read aloud, and his interplay with the Cowardly Lion is especially great. I think the trio's escape from Pokes—where they must keep singing because it's the only thing that stops the Pokes from putting them to sleep—is magnificently written stuff. This whole sideplot is really well done stuff, exactly what I want out of an Oz book... so it's a shame about the rest of it!

It's interesting to note what's different about Thompson as a writer. There are more asides to the reader, acknowledgements that you're reading a book, but like Baum occasionally did, she keeps up the fiction that she's merely reporting something that actually happened; she occasionally says things like, "Dorothy later told Ozma....", implying Ozma related the book's events to her. Suddenly both the Woggle-Bug and the Scarecrow have manservants too. Baum always liked puns, but here they come thick and fast... but for the first time, I think my son recognized one! When Sir Hokus joins Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, this is how things go:

Dropping on his knees before the little girl, Sir Hokus took her hand. "Let me go with you on this Quest for the valiant Scarecrow. Let me be your good Knight!" he begged eagerly.

"Good night," coughed the Cowardly Lion, who, to tell the truth, was feeling a bit jealous.

When I read that bit, my son was like, "!?," clearly recognizing that something was up, but not exactly what, and I explained as best I could, how there were two kinds of "(k)night." He'd better get used to the puns!

There is a Books of Wonder facsimile of this, but I already owned a Dover, and it's good enough to mean that upgrading isn't really warranted. It's a trade paperback, and a slightly smaller size, but it does have all the color plates, though they're collected in the middle of the book, not positioned throughout the text.

I pulled out a map of Oz to let us trace the Scarecrow's journey, and this inspired him to make another map. In this case, he forced my wife to draw this map, which I think turned out pretty good!

The plan, I think, is for this to be the map that appears in the end papers of [His Name] in Oz.

In the Tik-Tok maps, which my wife used as a model, west is on the right and east is on the left. By all accounts, this is how Baum envisioned Oz for whatever reason, so it is accurate... but as someone who grew up on the "corrected" map produced by the International Wizard of Oz Club (it was included in every Del Rey Oz book), it always looks wrong to me regardless. That's not where the Winkie Country goes!

Next up in sequence: The Magical Monarch of Mo

Reading Glinda of Oz Aloud to My Son... Plus He Makes His Own Maps!

Glinda of Oz: In which are related the Exciting Experiences of Princess Ozma of Oz, and Dorothy, in their hazardous journey to the home of the Flatheads, and to the Magic Isle of the Skeezers, and how they were rescued from dire peril by the sorcery of Glinda the Good
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

With this, my son and I come to the end of L. Frank Baum's contributions to the Oz mythos. This was his fourteenth and final Oz novel, which we read about eleven months after we started back with Wonderful Wizard (though as we've taken a couple detours on the way, this was our eighteenth Oz book together).

Originally published: 1920
Acquired: May 2022
Read aloud: June 2022

Like many of the late novels, I remembered little of it, but I did remember the Flatheads and the Skeezers. These are two warring tribes in the Gillikin Country: the Flatheads' heads stop at their brows, so they have to carry their brains around in cans, while the Skeezers live in a great domed city that can be submerged in a lake. Beyond this and a scene that appears on the cover of the Del Rey edition, though, I remembered little of it.

Like a lot of the later Baum books, I don't think it's a favorite, but I did enjoy it. It's distinctly a novel of two halves. The first half could actually be called Ozma of Oz, except that we already had that book, for it's the book that focuses on the princess of Oz more than any other of the original fourteen. Ozma isn't really the protagonist of any of the Oz books after her transformation from Tip, not even the one called Ozma of Oz, but here she's the co-protagonist with Dorothy. Emerald City established Ozma's pacifist ethos, and this novel explores that in detail, along with what it means for Ozma to be a fairy. (I think Scarecrow was the first book to call Ozma a fairy, something not very consistent with the backstory she received in Marvelous Land or Dorothy and the Wizard.)

Anyway, when Ozma hears about the war between the Skeezers and the Flatheads, she's determined to stop it—but to stop it by showing the Skeezers and the Flatheads a better way to behave, not by using force or anything. We also get an explanation from Ozma of how her fairy magic differs from the sorecery of Glinda and the wizardry of the Wizard: fairy magic is innate and doesn't need tools (though Ozma's magic wand seems to help), while sorcery and wizardry are more powerful but require learning and tools to implement. There's some good problem-solving by Ozma and Dorothy, too. Ozma is ultimately ineffectual in stopping the war, though, despite her pleas; and she and Dorothy ends up trapped in the underwater city of the Skeezers.

The second half of the book, then, shifts focus to Glinda, along with a subplot about a Skeezer named Ervic trying to disenchant some fish. Glinda makes a rescue party: she needs to raise the submerged city, and we see her and the Wizard trying various means of doing this, and we see how their magic is more mechanical than that of Ozma. Though Glinda is well-organized, she's actually not very effectual, either; Scraps has the key idea that enables them to get into the city, Ervic cleverly tricks a Yookoohoo into disenchanting the fish (revealing them to be Adepts at Magic), and Dorothy figures out the magic word that operates the city. It's not a very high-stakes novel; another writer might impose some kind of deadline on raising the city, but Baum goes to great pains to establish that no one is in any danger! It actually has the feel of some Golden Age science fiction to me, a group of competent people working together to reason their way through a problem. So like Magic of Oz, I enjoyed read it on a chapter to chapter basis even if ultimately it kind of doesn't add up to much as you feel it might.

A large number of characters go with Glinda to help raise the Skeezer city, but unlike in some of his other books, Baum is less effective at giving them all something to do. Button-Bright has a nice scene of getting lost and told off by Glinda, but the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion, Tik-Tok, Jack Pumpkinhead, Professor Woggle-Bug, the Shaggy Man, Uncle Henry, Cap'n Bill and Trot, the Glass Cat, and Betsy Bobbin are all there too, and most of them just fill out crowd scenes. It's nice for Baum to get so many favorite characters into his last novel, but I wish some of them had even got just one scene where they did something.

Like Magic, this felt influenced by the Great War then recently concluded: Ozma has to stop a war between two nations who have been usurped by dictators, a war their citizens don't want. Because of this, I used German accents for most of the Flatheads, and French for most of the Skeezers.

My son seemed to enjoy this one, though he was a bit worried that the submerged city wouldn't be raised. He even drew his own picture of the Skeezer and Flathead cities:

The green rectangle is the Flathead mountain, with the stuff on top being the Flathead village. The purple rectangle is the Skeezer dome; you can see it's above the lake at this point. The dark purple blocks inside the dome are the buildings of the Skeezer city. I think the red is the path from the one to the other?

He also drew this picture of Ozma's palace in the Emerald City:

The bits going up are the minarets. The big green blob is all of Ozma's stuff. The big oval that it is in has little shapes on its edge which are various rooms; specifically, the littlest one, directly to the left of the blob, is the Saw-Horse's room.

He also got a real tickle out of the Flatheads carrying their brains in cans, and the fact that the Supreme Dictator (Su-Dic) of the Flatheads and his wife made themselves smarter by stealing the cans of other Flatheads. A couple weeks later, he was playing Paw Patrol in Oz, and he had the idea that Mayor Humdinger was stealing the brains of all the Flatheads. I can just imagine it. "With all these brains, I can be the smartest mayor in Adventure Bay!"

So that's the end of our Baum journey, though there's plenty more Oz to go if we want. Here's all of the novels we've read so far together:

Belatedly realized I got the sequence wrong. We went Patchwork Girl, Sea Fairies, Tik-Tok, Sky Island, Scarecrow, Rinkitink. Oh well, not retaking the picture.

I've greatly enjoyed getting to read the Books of Wonder facsimiles, and glad for both my own sake and my son's that I upgraded from my mix of Del Reys and Puffins. The pictures looks great at their intended size, the reproduction is sharp, the color plates are really nice to see. Wonderful Wizard, Road, and Emerald City are probably the most interesting of the facsimiles, as they do cool things with color, but they've all been worthwhile. Neill's illustrations, color and black-and-white, are really something special.

On to Ruth Plumly Thompson!

Next up in sequence: The Royal Book of Oz

Reading The Magic of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Magic of Oz: A Faithful Record of the Remarkable Adventures of Dorothy and Trot and the Wizard of Oz, together with the Cowardly Lion, the Hungry Tiger and Cap'n Bill, in their successful search for a Magical and Beautiful Birthday Present for Princess Ozma of Oz
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

This, the penultimate Oz novel by Baum, I did have decent memories of from childhood, mostly of the magic word of transformation, Pyrzqxgl, which allows the speaker to transform any person into any thing. Kiki Aru, a Munchkin boy bored from living on dull Mount Munch, discovers the word and uses it to transform himself into an eagle and tour the countries adjacent to Oz; in Ev, he bumps into the old Nome King, Ruggedo, homeless since the events of Tik-Tok of Oz. Ruggedo persuades Kiki to use the magic word to create an army of beasts and help him conquer the Emerald City.

Originally published: 1919
Acquired: April 2022
Read aloud: May 2022

Meanwhile, the members of Ozma's court are looking for presents to get Ozma for her birthday. But what do you get the fairy princess who has everything? Trot, Cap'n Bill, and the Glass Cat travel to get a magic flower that the Glass Cat found on her travels; meanwhile, Dorothy and the Wizard go (along with the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger) to find some monkeys, because Dorothy's idea is to miniaturize some, train them to dance, and have them jump out of Ozma's birthday cake. (I guess when you live in a utopia, you have to seek what amusement you can.)

These three strands weave in and out of each other. Dorothy and the Wizard get to the Forest of Gugu right as Ruggedo is trying to assemble a beast army; Trot and Cap'n Bill get trapped on the island of the magic flower, and so the Glass Cat comes to ask the Wizard for help. I found it enjoyable to read a chapter at a time: it's nice to hear from Trot, Cap'n Bill, and the Glass Cat again, none of whom have had much to do across the past few books. I always like Cap'n Bill's practicality—he reasons some clever stuff about how to deal with the magic flower—and the flower itself is an interesting threat. I like getting to see the Glass Cat show off her stuff; Baum writes cats so well. The way the transformations are used is clever—there is some fun stuff where all the principal characters end up in weird bodies—and I like the way Kiki and Ruggedo are always trying to figure out how to out-scheme the other.

But when you finish the whole book, it all seems a bit dissatisfying, in that the book promises something more exciting than you actually got. The idea that Ruggedo might raise an army of beasts is an interesting one, but he doesn't really get anywhere with it; the beasts aren't really convinced by his rhetoric,* and the Wizard defeats them almost accidentally, and kind of anticlimactically. One kind of wishes the three plots converged in a way that made everything explode, rather than a way where they all kind of neutralize each other. The Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger coming back to wild beasts after so much time living in the Emerald City seems to have potential, but Baum doesn't do anything with it.

So, overall, a solid but uninspiring late-period Oz novel. My son seemed to enjoy it, and he did not like the idea that the magic island might cause Trot and Cap'n Bill to shrink away to nothing. I think it was while reading this one that he told me how [His Name] in Oz would begin: "A magician will send me to Oz, because he doesn't know I live in Florida, he thinks I live in Oz!" Which, to be honest, seems like the way an Oz novel really could begin.

* Though it was published after the war, I am pretty sure both this and Glinda of Oz were written during it, and you can definitely see traces of it in both. Here, we have would-be dictators amassing armies.

Reading The Tin Woodman of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Tin Woodman of Oz: A Faithful Story of the Astonishing Adventure Undertaken by the Tin Woodman, assisted by Woot the Wanderer, the Scarecrow of Oz, and Polychrome, the Rainbow's Daughter
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

After the sprawling cast of The Lost Princess of Oz, Baum gave the next book a much more focused set of characters. Indeed, of the last four books, The Tin Woodman of Oz is the only one to have nothing like an Oz-in-peril narrative. Instead, it's a personal quest and a story of personal values. I didn't have much memory of this story going in. I mean, I remembered it was about the Tin Woodman questing to find his lost love, and I remember the Tin Soldier and Chopfyt and Nimmie Amee, but I didn't remember anything about the actual plot, and I didn't remember if I liked it or not.

Originally published: 1918
Acquired: April 2022
Read aloud: May 2022

To be honest, post-Tik-Tok my memories from childhood have been much vaguer. I have two theories. One is that from Lost Princess on, I had Del Rey mass market paperbacks, and those shrunk the art down, and I have tended to find that the less spectacular the art, the less clear and less positive my memories. My other is that I was a chronology-focused child as much as I am a chronology-focused adult—if not moreso. So I do wonder if I would plan to reread them all, but not make it all the way through every time, with the end result that I have read the early ones many times but the later ones not as much.

In any case, I might not have many memories of this book but ended up really enjoying it reading it to my three-year-old son. It has a real unity of character and theme that is honestly kind of surprising for Baum. Woot the Wanderer wanders to the Tin Castle of the Tin Woodman in the Winkie Country, and upon being told that the Tin Woodman's whole reason for wanting a heart way back in book one was so that he could love a specific woman, wonders why the Tin Woodman never actually actually got together with her! So together with Woot and the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman sets out on a quest to find her again.

The thing that runs through the book is that the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow have been made somewhat arrogant by their years of adventures and the exalted statuses. They keep blundering into places where they don't belong and aren't wanted because it doesn't occur to them that they wouldn't be wanted—even when Woot points out there's a "KEEP OUT" sign! In some Oz novels, the visits to weird communities feel like padding, but here they highlight what going on with the Tin Woodman's character. When, in the middle of the novel, the Tin Woodman meets up with Dorothy and Ozma, they are both a bit skeptical about his mission to find his lost love... but he goes on anyway. When he finds his own head in a cabinet (more on that here), not even it wants anything to do with him! And then he finds out that Nimmie Amee has no desire to marry him, as she is happily married, and just wants him, like everyone else, to go away. She hasn't been sitting around pining for him; she forgot about him just like he forgot about her. It's a novel about finding joy in what you have already, and not presuming that you are needed where you are not.

There's lots of good stuff here. I liked Mrs. Yoop, the giantess who practices transformation magic, and the cleverness the protagonists need to show in escaping him. Baum thinks through things interestingly as always; Mrs. Yoop has a magic apron that opens and closes doors, which Woot steals, and when he uses it outside, it opens a hole in the ground! Polychrome has a nice substantial appearance, and again as she was in Sky Island, is much less air-headed than she seemed in Road and Tik-Tok, demonstrating a lot of intelligence, and demonstrating some very good fairy magic. The challenge of what to do with the green monkey transformation that Mrs. Yoop saddles Woot with is an interesting one. All this plus an appearance by my favorite minor recurring character, the former general Jinjur, as forceful as ever. (What happened to her husband, though?)

Lastly, this novel shows Baum working through the implications of his worldbuilding, especially the way it had changed over the years. When Baum wrote Wonderful Wizard, people in Oz could die, so there wasn't really any question about the body parts that Nick Chopper had lost. By the time of Tin Woodman, though, Baum had established that people in Oz don't die (and never had*)... even when chopped up into little bits! So why hadn't someone just reattached the lost pieces of Nick Chopper? And what had become of them, if they were still alive? Baum establishes you need "meat glue" to connect body parts, and no one had any... and that Nick Chopper's head has been sitting in a cabinet for decades! It's a perfectly logical outcome of all the (slightly contradictory) worldbuilding, and it could be macabre or disturbing, but Baum, as always, just presents it matter-of-factly. To a kid (I can attest from reading it aloud), it's more funny than anything else.

The creation of Chopfyt, made of leftover "meat" parts of the Tin Woodman and the Tin Soldier, is maybe slightly more disturbing, but there's a real "leave it be" moral in place by that part of the story. If he's who makes Nimmie Amee happy, who is anyone else to complain? Baum was always sort of fascinated by combining people to make other people; it's an idea we saw back in Sky Island, and right now (I am writing this back in mid-June) we are reading one of his other early borderlands fantasies, The Magical Monarch of Mo, where there's a woodchopper who ends up with a king's head glued on his body.

As I (re)read through these books, I'm always thinking about what characters never went on to star again. I quite liked the Tin Solider, the second tin man created by the same tinsmith as the Tin Woodman, who fell in love with the same woman, and ended up rusted in the same forest! At the end of the novel, Ozma assigns him to patrol the (seemingly) lawless Gillikin Country... and he promptly never appears again, aside from a brief cameo at Ozma's birthday party in Magic of Oz, even though the next two novels both largely take place in the Gillikin wilds! I liked his personality (I gave him a not-very-good-I'm-sure-working-class-English accent), and also I really want to know, exactly what army would a Munchkin soldier have been in around the time of Wonderful Wizard? The Tin Soldier of Oz, here we come, I guess!

* This book establishes that people in Oz have been immortal for a long time, clearly contradicting many aspects of Wonderful Wizard and other early novels (though Baum does contort to explain how the Wicked Witches could be killed). It also strongly implies that Ozma has been ruling Oz for a long time, and tells us that she's a fairy, a pretty blatant contradiction of the events we read about in Marvelous Land.

Reading The Lost Princess of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Lost Princess of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

After the one-two punch of The Scarecrow of Oz and Rinkitink, I felt like I was missing the Oz characters. Sure, they showed up in those massive celebrations at the end of each book (by now a traditional way for Baum to squeeze in all your favorite characters) but I missed all those folks, you know? Baum must have felt the same way (or, rather, known his readers would) because Lost Princess of Oz contrives to include a large number of familiar characters.

Originally published: 1917
Acquired: April 2022
Read aloud: May 2022

The premise here is that overnight, a number of things vanish: Glinda's Great Book of Records, the magical tools of both Glinda and the Wizard, Ozma's Magic Picture, (in the far-off Yip Country) a Magic Dishpan... and Ozma herself! Our characters must search the country without any of their customary powers at their disposal. They divide into four search parties, one for each of the four quadrants of Oz. Without any actual leads, their plans are apparently to just wander around looking for stuff; it seems to me that had Ozma been in the Gillikin Country, being searched by the Shaggy Man, his brother, Tik-Tok, and Jack Pumpkinhead, she might be lost still. Thankfully, she turns out to be in the Winkie Country, which is (wow what a coincidence) being search by the largest group, consisting of Dorothy, Trot, Betsy Bobbin, Button-Bright, the Wizard, Scraps the Patchwork Girl, the Cowardly Lion, the Woozy, the Sawhorse, and Toto. As they go, even more join the group: the Frogman, Cayke the Cookie Cook, and the Lavender Bear.

For the most part, Baum does an okay job by this large cast of characters. The Wizard gets some good problem-solving moments, and Scraps's sideways logic also comes in handy at times. Button-Bright's ability to get lost actually turns out to be a key plot point. The animal characters don't contribute much to the plot, but there are a couple scenes where they talk to each other a lot; in fact, Toto talks an unprecedented amount here, a marked contrast to his reticence to speak in Tik-Tok. The Woozy never really does anything, though; I have a feeling that Baum included him just because Neill like drawing him. (In many of the books, Neill includes the Woozy in crowd scenes where he is not mentioned in the text; this book has an illustration of the Woozy wearing an apron and doing dishes in the Magic Dishpan! Not a thing that actually happens but a delight to look at.)

The main issue is that having all three girls in the group is pretty pointless: narratively Dorothy, Trot, and Betsy are the same, and thus Trot and Betsy end up largely not doing anything. I think if Baum wanted to flesh out the relationship between the three girls (which would be a fun thing to do), he would have had to do something like make it be just the three of them. Or if he wanted to give Trot and Betsy something to do, he should have sent them out with other search parties (and given those search parties something to do). The working title was Three Girls in Oz, but reading the finished book, you can see why he dropped it.

Anyway, the whole thing is good fun. It does sort of beggar belief that Dorothy's search party finds Ozma in the third place they look after setting out in a totally random direction, and some of the rules Baum imposes on this "mystery" don't really make any sense (the characters conclude that Ozma must be in Oz because no one can cross the Deadly Desert... two books ago, Trot herself flew into Oz over the Deadly Desert!), and Baum seems to forget how the Magic Belt works (but if it did work here as it had in Ozma of Oz, the book would end around chapter five).

But it does the thing I like an Oz book to do: interesting places to visit, weird problems for the characters to reason their ways out of, good interactions between the characters. The misdirection of the clues about where Ozma is according to the truth-speaking Little White Bear are pretty cleverly done. I like any Oz book with Button-Bright comedy. I don't know what's up with the "Toto loses his growl subplot" but it is entertaining. The Frogman is an interesting character... though my favorite new character was Corporal Waddle, the little toy brown bear soldier who takes himself and his useless popgun very seriously. Stay tuned for Corporal Waddle in Oz?

My son seemed to enjoy it: lots of characters doing fun things. When I asked, he said, "I liked it the same as Rinkitink. I liked the good parts but didn't like the bad parts." The "bad parts" turned out to be the passage detailing how Ugu the Shoemaker traveled around Oz stealing all the magical implements and kidnapping Ozma. He also began telling me about his own oz book, [His Name] in Oz, which is exactly the same as The Lost Princess of Oz, except that he presses a button that defeats Ugu the Shoemaker so no one gets kidnapped! But more on that book in future installments...

One other thing to note: this is the first set-in-Oz novel Baum wrote after the publication of Tik-Tok, which included for the first time detailed maps of Oz. You can tell, because the descriptions of Oz geography suddenly become much more detailed and consistent here; Baum talks about rivers in the Winkie Country are, and what characterizes different regions of it. He continues to pay attention to geography in this way over the remaining three of his Oz novels, unlike the somewhat ad hoc way he had described things previously.