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 Enchanted Island of Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Enchanted Island of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson
illustrated by Dick Martin

After the success of Yankee in Oz, the Oz Club asked Ruth Plumly Thompson if she had any more manuscripts—and she did, an unpublished fantasy novel about a boy and his camel who go Somewhere. So Thompson rewrote it a little bit to take place in Oz, and the Club published it in 1976.

Originally published: 1976
Acquired: December 2023
Read aloud: August–September 2024

If Yankee was somewhat generic Thompson adventure but fun enough to get away with it, Enchanted Island is a somewhat generic Thompson adventure but largely not fun enough to get away with it. I liked Humpty the Camel well enough, and some of the stuff about Kapurta, the "enchanted island" of the title, is pretty fun, but aside from that, there wasn't much to this. David and Humpty go from place to place, go away, and so on. There's little cleverness, little sense of adventure. Like in a lot of Thompsons, everything is pretty much solved accidentally and with little input from our protagonists; ideas that are set up in the beginning (such as Humpty's longing for the king he was torn away from) are never returned to. There weren't a lot of pictures in Dick Martin's Yankee, but it seems to me that here there are even fewer ones. It's perfectly serviceable as an Oz book, and very quick, but you've read a lot of it before.

Despite that, I found myself wanting a sequel. There's a lot of interesting elements here that could make a great story; I'd love to see David return to Kapurta to be reunited with Humpty and King Rupert and go on some kind of quest involving the magic wishing buttons.

Still, my six-year-old seemed decently into it... but I'd also guess that a week after we finished it, they'd struggle to tell you much about it. Although, they were very much delighted by all the magic party shenanigans in the last chapter involving the birthday button! (I edited out the claim that the Cowardly Lion liked and would adopt the name "Cowy"; c'mon now, no way.)

Next up in sequence: The Forbidden Fountain of Oz

Reading Yankee in Oz Aloud to My Kid

Yankee in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson
illustrated by Dick Martin

In, I believe, the late 1950s, Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote an Oz book and offered it to Reilly & Lee (this would have been after Hidden Valley, before Merry Go Round), but they were uninterested. Over a decade later, the International Wizard of Oz Club offered to publish her manuscript (with permission from the official publisher) with illustrations by Dick Martin, making it the first of their so-called "quasi-canonical" Oz books. My kid and I read it after Merry Go Round, when it was finally published.

Originally published: 1973
Acquired: July 2024
Read aloud: July–August 2024

Before this, Ruth Plumly Thompson wrote nineteen Oz books, and I have read enough of them to know exactly what to expect. Thomas P. Terry, better known as "Tompy" is a band kid and football player swept by a hurricane right out of a Labor Day parade into Oz; there he meets Yankee, a test dog for a NASA moon orbit whose capsule crash-landed in Oz as well. As is pretty typical, Thompson devotes little time to justifying the adventure and just kind of gets on with it. Thompson always does well by animals, and the charming relationship between Tompy and Yankee, who quickly become devoted to each other, is the real highlight of the book. This lacks the frantic pacing of  some of her books; Tompy and Yankee travel from place to place and meet interesting people. The idea of people you can make by just adding water to a powder is a great Ozzy visual, and I really enjoyed the tone of the section about the Lanternese, who have paper lanterns for heads (and thus cannot speak).

Like a lot of Thompson books, there's also the ingredients for an interesting quest she doesn't quite deliver on. Tompy and Yankee are asked by the people of Wackajammy to rescue their lost princess, but they selfishly refuse. In a book by a different author, you might expect this would be a set-up for a moral lesson to the protagonists... but not so here! They refuse to be helpful, and accidentally bump into her and rescue her and are lauded as heroes for it. Wow. They do both get some good heroic moments, though, taking down the giant Badmannah, who has been kidnapping princesses for his cave. (On the other hand, there are two separate occasions where Tompy bangs his drumsticks on something for no reason and that ends up coincidentally being exactly what was needed to be done.) Badmannah escalates up to kidnapping an oddly powerless and resourceless Ozma (well, par for the course for Thompson, again), and Jinnicky, Tompy, and Yankee manage to save her. Sometimes Thompson protagonists contribute nothing, while convenient magicians show up, and there is a bit of that with Jinnicky the Red Jinn, but both characters have their own pivotal moments.

There's also a prophecy that seems like it should be important but goes nowhere, and Tompy and Yankee acquire a book that lets them read minds... which they never use to do anything significant! The careful plotting of Merry Go Round in Oz this is not; like a lot of Thompson's books, it reads like a first draft.

If she gets away with it, it's because of the aforementioned relationship between Yankee and Tompy. Unusually, the book has a whole chapter set back in America at the end. There's a real sense of sadness as it seems like they will have to give up their relationship because Yankee can't speak outside of Oz. This comes all right, of course, but I think my six-year-old was a bit tense, judging by how delighted he was when it all worked out. And there's a very fun bit where Tompy actually goes to a bookstore to buy a copy of Purple Prince to read to Yankee so he can know more about their friend Jinnicky. We've had a few Oz protagonists who have read Oz books, but this is the most specific reference thus far.

Dick Martin's illustrations are largely sparse and boring; whole chapters go by with no pictures, and lots are simple little images of Yankee. There are neat visuals and key characters that go wholly unillustrated. I guess he did it for free, but still.

Not one of Thompson's best, but not one of her worst, either. Pleasant but undemanding, which is sometimes what you want out of a trip to Oz, after all.

I bought print-on-demand copies of this book and Forbidden Fountain from Lulu, where they have been put by the Oz Club. The original 1970s edition was oversized, with lots of text on big pages; this was a hardcover at the same size as all the other Oz books. It had an unfortunate number of typos, though; very distracting. Picking up these two books finished off my collection of "quasi-canonical" novels, which you can see to the right. Lining them up, I was appreciative that Eric Shanower maintained a consistent visual design for the three he illustrated... even though they were released by three different publishers!

Next up in sequence: The Enchanted Island of Oz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up in sequence: The Wonder City of Oz

Reading The Silver Princess in Oz Aloud to My Son

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up in sequence: Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz

Reading Handy Mandy in Oz Aloud to My Son

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up in sequence: The Silver Princess in Oz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

Next up in sequence: Handy Mandy in Oz

Reading The Wishing Horse of Oz Aloud to My Son

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up in sequence: Captain Salt in Oz

Reading Speedy in Oz Aloud to My Son

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

There's a game you can play when you read a Ruth Plumly Thompson Oz novel: which L. Frank Baum book did she reread before writing it? In some cases this is very obvious: she must have reread The Marvelous Land of Oz before writing Lost King and Patchwork Girl before writing Ojo in Oz. In other cases, it's not so obvious but you can make a good argument for it: some small details in Pirates in Oz, for example, make it seem as though Thompson had recently reread Rinkitink in Oz.

Originally published: 1934
Acquired: April 2023
Read aloud: May–June 2023

Along those lines, I would like to suggest that before writing Speedy in Oz, Thompson must have read not an Oz book, but one by L. Frank Baum nonetheless: Sky Island. The obvious link is that both novels largely take place on floating islands. But I would argue it goes beyond this: Speedy in Oz does something that I think is unique in the annals of Thompson's Oz novels, and almost unique in terms of Oz stories more broadly... it all takes place in a single location! This is a Thompson novel without a single "irrelevant enclave"; like Sky Island, the novel is about our protagonists being in a particular place and needing to solve the problems of that place in order to solve their own problems. I don't think there's any other Oz novel like it, though I can think of some that come close, albeit none of them by Thompson (e.g., Ozma of Oz, Scarecrow of Oz, Glinda of Oz).

But let's set the stage. Speedy in Oz (which surely ought to have been called something like The Umbrella Island of Oz, let's be honest) brings back Speedy, the boy protagonist from Yellow Knight, who my four-year-old son did not even remember even though we read it only six months / four books ago, but that didn't really matter. Speedy comes across a dinosaur skeleton in Yellowstone, which has been excavated by a paleontologist. Speedy and his inventor uncle reassemble it... right on top of a geyser! When the geyser erupts, Speedy and the skeleton are thrown into the air, and the force of the blast fuses the bones of the skeleton back together... and grants it life!? They fly through the air for hours before finally landing on Umbrella Island. My wife was listening as I read this bit aloud and she expressed her disbelief. There's no explanation given as to why something seemingly magical would take place, and indeed, later the characters seem fairly certain that if the dinosaur (who gets named Terrybubble) returned to America, its life would cease again. I think by this point Thompson had kind of given up on putting thought into how people got to Oz; to write an Oz book, you have to get some young American there fairly promptly and your audience knows and expects that, so why waste time explaining it too much? And you've got to have some kind of living animal or other grotesque, so why put too much work into explaining that either? (It hangs better together than in Giant Horse, where a living statue in America falls through the ground and somehow ends up in the Munchkin country.)

Umbrella Island, however, has been having problem. Asleep at the wheel, King Sizzeroo crashed it into the giant Loxo the Lucky, and Loxo has demanded Sizzeroo's daughter (who he thinks is a boy), the princess Gureeda (as in "go read a book," since that's all she does), in recompense; the island has six months to cough her up, and Loxo has a magic magnet that can pull the island back to him no matter where it flees. But when Speedy lands on the island, one of Sizzeroo's advisors notices that if dressed in similar clothes, Speedy could pass for Gureeda... so why not convince him to live on the island and hand him over instead? So Speedy and Terrybubble begin to integrate themselves into life on the island but there's this undercurrent of threat in the background.

It all works brilliantly, I would say. Thompson loves her small kingdoms with childlike rulers and comedy advisors (sometimes good and sometimes evil; see Pumperdink, Mudge, Ragbad, Kimbaloo, Rash, Patch, and many many more), but setting a whole novel in the same one lets her flesh out its dimensions and characters, none is wholly good or wholly bad, and certainly my son was able to keep track of the various advisors for one of the first times (with the occasional nudge). Terrybubble is a great animal character; he's a giant dinosaur skeleton... but all he wants to be is Speedy's loyal dog! There's some good problem-solving, something Thompson sometimes neglects in her novels; here, Umbrella Island crash-lands in the Nonestic Ocean and the steering mechanism seizes up... with Umbrella Island stuck right between the warring islands of Roaraway and Norroway. So it's up to Speedy to come up with a way to save the island, not knowing that even if he does, the islanders will do him in. Pansy the Watchcat is another of Thompson's fun rhyming animal characters. (Shades of Sky Island's rhyming parrot, actually!) There's even an undercurrent of romance to the whole thing, as Speedy is falling for Gureeda, but also frustrated with her bookish ways.

In the end, Terrybubble overhears the king and his advisor discussing the plan, and steals away with Speedy and Gureeda in the night, only to inadvertently land right on Big Enough Mountain, home of Loxo. My one complaint is that Speedy plays little role in the climax of the book bearing his name, but maybe his moment of heroism with Roarway is enough to counteract that.

The whole thing has a very different tone and feel to other Thompson novels, and both me and my son really enjoyed it. In fact, it was Thompson's favorite of her own books; I think my favorite is probably still Kabumpo, but this would come in second.

Certainly our enjoyment was enhanced by the edition we read being an International Wizard of Oz Club facsimile of the original Reilly & Lee; this was far better than the SeaWolfs and Del Reys we've been reading for most Thompson. Excellent color plates as always from John R. Neill, and when reproduced at proper size, his black-and-white illustrations add so much liveliness to the world of the text. My son was so happy to have color pictures for the first time in a long while, and we spent a bit of time flipping back and forth through them. The Oz Club is out of copies of Speedy, but I found it pretty easy to get a reasonably priced used copy on the secondary market. Alas, I think we have just one Oz book with color pictures to go (the Oz Club's edition of Wishing Horse), because starting with Captain Salt, the originals were black and white to begin with.

It ends on a melancholy note: Speedy would be welcome to stay on Umbrella Island, but feels he has to return home to hand over the schematics of Roaraway's water gun to his inventor uncle. It is, after all, 1934 and there is a war coming. If I've got my sums right, Speedy would be about eighteen when war actually does break out (for America, anyway) in 1941 and thus eligible to join the Navy as he desires here. I understand there's an Oziana short story about Speedy returning to Umbrella Island, but I find myself curious about what kind of adventures he might have had in the real world as an adult.

But, the narrator tells us that Umbrella Island flies into the outside world sometimes, Terrybubble leaning over the edge to see if he can find Speedy once again, rope ladder lowered so he can climb aboard. It's a bit sad to imagine Terrybubble forever pining for his lost master, but the narrator says probably Speedy will return and become king one day. However, the narrator says that if you see the island float over your house one night, then you should climb right up the rope ladder. 

"Dad!" my son exclaimed upon hearing this, "Oz is real!"

And indeed, in Speedy, it really does feel like it is.

Next up in sequence: The Wishing Horse of Oz

Reading Ojo in Oz Aloud to My Son

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

Prior to this novel, Thompson never showed the slightest interest in Ojo, the protagonist of my favorite Oz novel, The Patchwork Girl of Oz. (To be fair, I don't think Baum did after Patchwork Girl either.) It's a bit surprising, then, that she'd devote a book to him; one kind of imagines her publisher going, "okay, Ruth, enough books about your characters, give us one about one of Frank's," and then she runs her finger down a list of Oz characters until she comes to the most prominent one to not yet get a book.

Originally published: 1933
Acquired: April 2023
Read aloud: April–May 2023

The book begins with Ojo being kidnapped. Specifically, kidnapped by members of the Romani people, though of course the book uses what is now considered an ethnic slur to describe them. This is, to be honest, super weird—and of course highly offensive. It is, I think, the first time a human ethnic group has been mentioned as residing in Oz. It's been pretty clear that Munchkins, Quadlings, Gillikins, and Winkies are their own ethnic groups. We've never heard of, say, Hispanics hanging out somewhere in Oz, even if we do occasionally get people who are very clearly based on some kind of real-world ethnicity (such as the clearly Arabianesque Mudgers of Cowardly Lion).

And, of course, the Roma are unrepentant villains: they have a bear captive against his well, they kidnap Ojo, they are dirty, they fight, they steal. As soon as Unc Nunkie sees the Roma roll into the Emerald City, he knows they are up to no good, and he runs to tell Ozma that. Thompson loves to truck in racial stereotypes, and this is definitely the most awful instance of that since Royal Book. At the end of the book, Ozma deports all the Roma to southern Europe—while she gives the book's bandits nice farms in the Winkie country even though the bandits have been doing the exact same thing as the Roma!

To the extent that I could, I solved this problem when reading the book aloud to my four-year-old son by remaking them into people just called "Takers," and at the end of the novel, I had Ozma send them to the Quadling Country, where the firm rule of Glinda would teach them how to be good. If I had realized that a robber band would play a significant role in the novel, though, I might have picked a different name, because it's a bit confusing I think to have both "Takers" and "robbers"! I felt validate by my decision when, at the end of the book, I asked my son how he liked it. "I mostly loved it," he said. When I asked what he didn't love, he said, "The parts about the Takers and Mooj the Magician." I am very glad he did not say that about a real-life ethnic group... but if when he gets older he wants to read these books himself, we will definitely need to have a conversation around this one.

Now, if you can get past all this—and I don't blame you if you can't—it is a solid, above-average Thompson novel. After Ojo is kidnapped by the Roma, the Roma are set upon by bandits who capture Ojo in turn. The bandits learn that Ojo is wanted: whoever brings him to Moojer Mountain will receive bag upon bag of sapphires. So the leader of the bandits, the charming, aristocratic Realbad, heads off to Moojer Mountain with Ojo and the bear, Snufferbux, in tow. They get into the usual Thompson hijinks, visiting a crystal city frozen by a blue dragon, a town where everyone taps their feet instead of speaking, a forest ruled over by unicorns, and so on. Like in the better Thompsons, it's elevated by the interplay between the characters. Of course Ojo wants to escape from Realbad... but he also finds himself looking up to and admiring the courageous bandit. This is something Snufferbux does not understand at all, and he keeps trying to get Ojo to slip away with him and run off for the Emerald City. Realbad and Snuffer grouse at each other as Ojo tries to keep the peace; the three work together to solve the problems they end up in. (There's also a brief subplot about Dorothy, Scraps, and the Cowardly Lion trying to find Ojo; Thompson always does well by all three, so it's a good combination.)

At the end of the novel, Ozma, the Wizard, and Unc Nunkie finally catch up to Ojo and company, and everything is solved in a second by Ozma's Magic Belt. This, surely, is the tough part of writing an Oz book; you have to keep Ozma and the Wizard as far away from the action as long as possible.

We get all the usual explanations: in classic Thompson fashion, it turns out Ojo is secretly a prince, for Realbad is secretly his father, and secretly Ree Alla Bad, the rightful King of Seebania. Seebania was a forest kingdom who used to exert dominion over all the southern Munchkin Country, but when Ozma came to the throne, the relinquished their power. That was around when Mooj the Magician turned up, worming his way into power; then he destroyed Ree Alla Bad's father, made himself King of Seebania, and exiled Ree Alla Bad, telling him that if he ever spoke of his true identity or what had happened in Seebania, his magic would destroy his wife, the Princess Isomere. So Ree Alla Bad fell in with a robber band and adopted the persona of Realbad; meanwhile, Isomere gave birth to a son, Ojo, in captivity, and Ree Alla Bad's uncle made off with him.

Why didn't Unc Nunkie ever tell anyone all of this? Not very clear, to be honest. How did Ozma and Glinda not notice any of this? Also not clear, but probably we can posit that Ozma's ascension into power after Marvelous Land was a bit more tumultuous than is directly shown in the books. If the Seebanians controlled the southern Munchkins pre-Ozma, wouldn't that have been during the time of the Wicked Witch of the East? Between this book and Giant Horse, Thompson has created quite a troubled history for rulers of the Munchkins. Mooj was attempting to eliminate Ojo in order to secure his hold on the Seebanian crown, but in drawing Realbad's attention to Ojo, inadvertently brought about his own doom. (Ozma turns Mooj into a drop of water, but this seemed unnecessarily cruel, so I had her just strip him of his magic powers. I wish we saw more of Mooj here, actually; his clock magic was interesting.)

Some complain that Thompson takes interesting characters off the board in her books, but I'm not sure this was true of Ojo, for he was never really on the board to begin with, and there's a nice hook for future adventures with Ree Alla Bad, Ojo, and Snuffer all living together now, though neither Thompson nor any other writer ever picked up on it. I think Thompson does well by Ojo's character; his attraction to Realbad ties in well with a practical slyness in Ojo's character that we saw in Patchwork Girl, though I would have appreciated once reference to his status as Ojo the Lucky né Unlucky.

Our run of Thompson Del Reys.
The POD editions are slightly larger than the original
1980s printings we purchased via the Oz Club.

This is the last of the Thompson Del Reys we'll be reading. There were only two more after this, but we'll be reading those two books in different editions that include the color plates. Del Rey didn't quite make it through all of her contributions to the Famous Forty; I assume the sales weren't quite there, but they reprinted much more of her work than anyone else ever has. And, thanks to the miracle of print-on-demand, they have kept it in print! Aside from the generally strong Michael Herring covers, they are not always attractive editions, with some of John R. Neill's linework overly compressed, and many typographical issues. But if you want to read the Thompsons that are still under copyright, they are certainly your best bet. I wonder, however, to whom they are sending their royalties.

Next up in sequence: Speedy in Oz

Reading The Purple Prince of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Purple Prince of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

After some Oz books my son and I seemed to move through more slowly, this one we finished in just over a month. I attribute this to its clearer narrative focus—clearer in the sense it's more readily glommed onto by a four-year-old—and strong set of protagonists, especially Kabumpo.

Originally published: 1932
Acquired: February 2023
Read aloud: February–March 2023

This book is a sequel to Thompson's Kabumpo in Oz: at the end of that book, Prince Pompadore of Pumperdink married Princess Peg Amy of Sun Top Mountain. This one opens with them happily living in Pumperdink with their daughter, Princess Pajonia, and Pompa's parents, the king and queen of Pumperdink, when a young Gillikin mountain boy named Randy comes to court, and is adopted by Kabumpo, the Elegant Elephant of Oz, as his attendant. Most of the characters from Kabumpo, however, don't really factor into this, as in short order the entire Royal Family of Pumperdink is enchanted in a plot by Kettywig, the king's brother, and Faleero, the evil fairy princess of Follensby Forest. So Kabumpo and Randy set off on a quest to disenchant the Royal Family.

Kabumpo is Thompson's greatest addition to the pantheon of Oz characters, and this book shows why. The Elegant Elephant is loyal and intelligent, but also stubborn and conceited, which makes him always fun to read about, and always interesting. Like Baum's best characters, he has attributes that sometimes are the key to solving problems, and sometimes lead to problems. Randy is a bit of a generic Thompson protagonist, but he's fine enough. Together, the two of them do that typical Thompson thing of moving from weird place to weird place before they finally end up in Ev and meet Jinnicky the Red Jinn, who was a minor character in Jack Pumpkinhead, but here ends up joining them on their quest to stop Faleero. The Jinn doesn't take much seriously, which makes him a good contrast to the overly serious Kabumpo.

Like the best Oz books, we have an adventuring party of mixed personalities with a clear goal. So even though much of what the characters do along the way is pretty incidental, and there's not as much clever problem-solving as in, say, Jack Pumpkinhead, it's hard not to enjoy the ride. Both me and my son were carried through it pretty well, and had a good time. As it often is for Thompson, the ending is more down to coincidence than cleverness, but whatever.

About halfway through the book, we have an interlude in the Gillikin mountain kingdom of Regalia, where we learn their young prince is on a quest to prove himself worthy of being king. Which character could be this eponymous purple prince??? Hilariously, my son had no guesses at all in this novel with literally only one possible candidate, and by the time it was revealed, he had forgotten all about that interlude anyway. But Randy is actually Prince Randywell Handywell Brandenburg Bompadoo of Regalia, and becomes King of Regalia following his fulfillment of the quest; he'll turn up again (with more Kabumpo and Jinnicky, I think) in The Silver Princess in Oz.

As I have said before, I owned all the Baum books as a kid and a few Books of Wonder Thompsons; the rest of the Thompsons I got through interlibrary loan on 1990s dial-up thanks to my mother and the public library system of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. I don't know which ones I actually got and read, because nothing from any Thompson novel thus far has struck any kind of chord of familiarity.

But I do know I read Purple Prince, because this was the one Thompson Oz novel owned by the Cincinnati library system. This meant I couldn't ILL it... but the problem was that it was in the noncirculating collection at the downtown library, so I couldn't check it out either. (It would have been, after all, a valuable sixty-year-old book by that point.) My very indulgent family thus went on a trip to the downtown library, where I parked myself in a chair for a couple hours and read the whole book in one go! I am not sure how they entertained themselves. So I know for a fact that I read this one as a kid... but still I remembered nothing of it before cracking it open to read it to my son.

Next up in sequence: Ojo in Oz