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 The Wicked Witch of Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Wicked Witch of Oz by Rachel Cosgrove Payes
illustrated by Eric Shanower

Like many Oz fans, I suppose, my kid likes how the books lend themselves to indexing and organizing. Four quadrants of Oz, each with its own color, and each with its own ruler. Each also has its own wicked witch... well, almost. In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, the Wizard stated that when he arrived in Oz, each quadrant was ruled by its own witch, good ones in the north and south, and wicked ones in the east and west, but Ozma told him that before that, the north and south had been ruled by wicked witches as well. The Wicked Witches of the East and West we of course met (and disposed of) back in the very first book, and the Wicked Witch of the North, Mombi, appeared in Marvelous Land. But who was the Wicked Witch of the South, and what was her story? My kid has long asked me this question—and from our looking at covers of future Oz books, has long known we would someday find the answer to that question in The Wicked Witch of Oz.

Published: 1993
Acquired: June 2024
Read aloud: June–July 2024

The story goes that after writing Hidden Valley, Rachel Cosgrove offered Reilly & Lee a second Oz book, called Percy in Oz. But Reilly & Lee passed on the book, and the manuscript sat in Cosgrove's trunk for forty years (by which point she had married and was known as Rachel Cosgrove Payes*) until it was published by the International Wizard of Oz Club with illustrations by Eric Shanower under the title The Wicked Witch of Oz. As is my usual method on my journey through Oz with my kid, we read it where it would have been published, not where it was, my reasoning being they were far more likely to remember and care about relevant characters in this sequence. (This does create a minor discontinuity, in that a character from Merry Go Round in Oz, which we haven't read yet, appears in a crowd scene.)

The story, like many of Baum's own, is tantalizing but light on backstory. It begins with Singra, the Wicked Witch of the South, awaking from a hundred-year sleep in her hut in the Red Forest of the Quadling Country. We are told Glinda put her to sleep (consistent with the statement in Dorothy and the Wizard that "Glinda the Good had conquered the evil Witch in the South") but given little beyond this. How did Glinda do this? Why put her to sleep (and then, apparently, forget about her)? What kind of terror did Singra get up to? We are not told, because the story much more focuses on the present-day machinations of Singra, though it does give us the tantalizing bit of information that Singra is cousin to the Wicked Witches of the East and West—our first indication in the Oz novels, in fact, that they were related to each other. (The 1939 film made them sisters.) The book does seem to indicate Singra did not rule the Quadling country previously, when she thinks about how nice it would be to rule it.

Singra is a protagonist here; many of the book's chapters follow her decisions and actions. On waking up, she learns that while she was a sleep a girl named Dorothy killed her cousins, so she plots her revenge: turning Dorothy into a piece of cheese! This requires stealing some ingredients from Glinda's palace and even capturing the Scarecrow, but things go wrong for her when she accidentally transforms Trot, thinking her Dorothy. Dorothy and Percy the White Rat (from Hidden Valley) immediately set out in pursuit of Singra, and have various adventures, meeting a "rubber band" (i.e., a band whose members are made of rubber), making friends with a living neon light named Leon, getting captured by giant bees, and being partially transformed into hummingbirds before finally catching up with Singra... who then turns Dorothy into a statue!

My kid repeatedly indicated they found the book scary and that they didn't like it. They have never like reading about "bad things" happening, and Wicked Witch has more of those than most Oz books: Singra stealing things, Singra tying up the Scarecrow and taking some of his straw, Singra transforming Trot, Singra transforming Dorothy. I think to an adult reader, it doesn't come across as terribly perilous, but it totally works for a five-year-old. (Even though at one point they told me they were pretty sure Dorothy would not be a piece of cheese in later Oz books.) It did, I suspect, keep them involved in the book—for the past year or so, we've averaged one Oz book per month (compared to our earlier rate of twenty-three in one year), but we flew through this one in just a couple weeks because they kept on asking for chapters (whereas normally we just read a chapter on the alternate days that I do bedtime). How would Dorothy be saved?

Though it has the problems in the ending of many Oz books (once Ozma knows what's going on, the book wraps up pretty quickly, because there's little Ozma can't do with the Magic Belt, the Magic Picture, and the Wizard to call upon), I too enjoyed it a lot. I do like it when "wicked" characters are co-protagonists in Oz books (e.g., Lost King, Pirates) because they are often sly and clever, and it's interesting to kind of root both for and against them. The book is much more focused than Cosgrove's Hidden Valley, with a smaller cast of characters: just Percy, Dorothy, and later Leon in the adventuring party. This means the characters all get to contribute (unlike the extraneous Cowardly Lion and Hungry Tiger in Hidden Valley), and Dorothy comes across as the forthright protagonist we're used to from previous books. The communities they bump into on their journey are interesting without being distracting, and like in Hidden Valley, Cosgrove is good about the characters using their cleverness to get out of situations. The incidents feel Baumian without feeling derivative; the partial forced transformation into hummingbirds, for example, recalls Road to Oz, and Leon the Neon is a great idea.

I think it's probably also impossible to understate what a difference good illustrations make to an Oz book, and Wicked Witch is blessed with ones by Eric Shanower, surely the best Oz illustrator other than Denslow and Neill. His illustrations are detailed but also whimsical, capturing the imagery of the text in an evocative way: I loved his pictures of Leon the Neon, for example, and Percy and Dorothy with hummingbird wings is an amazing visual. (Sure this is the only official Oz novel to show us Dorothy's belly button!) There's a good sense of humor to the images too; my kid and I both loved his pictures of the cheese-obsessed Percy. And the pictures aren't just there in quality, but also quantity: each chapter has a title page with a small picture, whereas the first page of each chapter has a big image that wraps around the text, spanning two pages. (J. L. Bell has a great discussion of the book's visual design here.) Indeed, there's no two-page spread of the book that is image-less; again, compare with Hidden Valley, where my three-year-old (who will read Oz with us a bedtime) would look at a two-page spread of pure text and complain, "I want to see a picture!" Crazy to think that Shanower offered to reillustrate Hidden Valley when the Oz Club republished it, and they turned him down!

Other Thoughts:

• For the first time, I think, my kid actually got a punny creation in an Oz book: they understood both meanings of "rubber band" here, being familiar both with actual rubber bands and getting what it meant to have a band made out of rubber. They boggled a bit.
  
• There is a very rare post-Neill reference to Ruth Plumly Thompson's books here, with the Wizard's searchlight (from Yellow Knight and Ojo) being mentioned, though not used, as a way to find the missing Trot.
  

Next up in sequence: Merry Go Round in Oz

* While Hidden Valley was her first ever book, by 1993 she had published numerous novels, most of them romances with titles like Love's Escapade, Bride of Fury, Moment of Desire, and Satan's Mistress. Not exactly Oz material!

Reading The Hidden Valley of Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Hidden Valley of Oz by Rachel R. Cosgrove
illustrated by Dirk

The Hidden Valley of Oz is a landmark book for me: though not the last book in the "Famous Forty" (there is one more to go), it is the last that I had not read before, as I owned the fortieth and final one, Merry Go Round in Oz, when I was a kid. So my reading it aloud to my five-year-old kid was the first time I had ever read it, and the last time I will ever discover a new "canonical" Oz novel.

Originally published: 1951
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: May–June 2024

Like Jack Snow, it seems like Rachel Cosgrove was very consciously aping L. Frank Baum in her contribution to the Famous Forty; more specifically, she was definitely aping The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In Wonderful Wizard, an American child is whisked through the air to Oz where grateful locals think they are a witch or wizard and send them on a quest for a distant ruler with animal companions in tow. In Hidden Valley, an American child is whisked through the air to Oz where grateful locals think they are a witch or wizard and send them on a quest for a distant ruler with animal companions in tow. While the Munchkins were grateful to Dorothy for killing the Wicked Witch of the East and send her off to see the Wizard of Oz, Jonathan "Jam" Manley lands in the Gillikin country. He doesn't kill anyone for the Gillikins, but they send Jam off to find the Emperor of the Winkies, because they believe his axe is the key to liberating them from the tyranny of a giant named Terp the Terrible.

This "back to basics" approach also manifests in who Jam meets, and how the story is told. When Jam meets the Emperor of the Winkies, he is of course the Tin Woodman, and they are joined on their journey by Dorothy and the Scarecrow (plus also the Hungry Tiger). So we get a classic formula for an Oz story, told with a set of classic characters. The way it is told is also very Baum: unlike in a Ruth Plumly Thompson or John R. Neill novel, where the characters plunge from encounter to encounter, for the first time in a long while, we have an Oz story where they amble from encounter to encounter, slowly walking from point A to point B and back again, encountering various obstacles on the way. And like in one of Baum's better novels (e.g., Dorothy and the Wizard, Patchwork Girl), those encounters are ones that require clever thinking on the part of our protagonists to escape danger. That said, the dangers are very Thompsonian: two of the three irrelevant enclaves that Jam and company meet are ones that want to convert the protagonists into their own weird way of living (as books and snowmen). The original animal characters here, Percy the White Rat and the Leopard with Changing Spots especially, are fun additions.

So far so good. But I found the book weak in a couple key areas. One is that there are simply too many characters in the adventuring party: across the course of the book we have Jam, Percy, Pinny and Gig (two guinea pigs), Jam's sentient kite, Dorothy, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, Spots, and the Rhyming Dictionary. Though there's no point where all eleven characters are in the party at once, Cosgrove clearly struggles to give them all something to do, and twice resorts to characters just leaving the group for sort of flimsy reasons. And among the ones who don't leave, it's really only Percy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman who consistently contribute; Jam feels like an also-ran in his own book, Dorothy might as well not be there, and the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger are wasted. I like the emphasis on clever problem solving, something sorely missing from many of the recent Oz novels, but it would have been nice for Jam to do something in the book. The climactic fight against Terp seems like the place for that, but it's actually the previously hapless Gillikins who do most of the heavy lifting for some reason! The party comes up with a clever plan, but I wish the party had been the ones to put it into action.

The book is also let down by the illustrations, probably the worst to ever appear in an canonical Oz novel. Sketchy and utterly lacking in whimsy or charm or imagination. And so few of them too! ("The food at this place is really terrible." "Yeah, I know; and such small portions!")

My kid seemed to enjoy it; they were particularly fascinated by the fact that the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman used hypnotism to defeat the monster guarding the magic muffin tree that made Terp the Terrible into a giant. I think they particularly liked the new animal characters. But I don't think it's one they loved either. Which, I think, is a fair assessment. I am hoping Cosgrove's other Oz novel is more involving.

Next up in sequence: The Wicked Witch of Oz