Reading Sky Pyrates over Oz Aloud to My Kid—Our Last "Official" Oz Novel!

I think The Emerald Wand of Oz and Trouble Under Oz were intended to be the first two of four books authorized by the Baum Family Trust, published by book packager Byron Preiss and publisher HarperCollins. But Byron Preiss died in a car accident, and I think the books didn't sell very well anyway.

But there was clearly also unfinished business. The first two books both had Dorothy missing, and mysterious clouds that would pop up and bedevil Dori and Em. I think it's pretty impressive, then, that years later Sherwood Smith decided to do a third book that would wrap it all up, published through Pumpernickel Pickle, one of those small presses that exists to essentially self-publish Oz novels. Illustrator William Stout did not return; instead, the book was illustrated by Kim McFarland, herself an author and illustrator of the self-published A Refugee in Oz (2010).

Sky Pyrates over Oz by Sherwood Smith
illustrated by Kim McFarland

Published: 2014
Acquired: September 2024
Read aloud: May–June 2025

The first book took place on the ground, the second under it. The third, naturally then, takes us up into the sky. Like Trouble, Sky Pyrates uses a specific Baum novel as a clear jumping-off point, but in this case, not an Oz one: rather, it's Sky Island that inspires this book. Though Dori and Em never go to the Sky Island in this book, they do meet one character from it, and interact with a whole archipelago of islands that float above and around Oz.* It's an evocative setting, and it's Smith's most Ozzy one so far (I didn't find Unicorn Valley in Emerald Wand very interesting and Trouble Under stuck to preexisting locations from the canon). Raggedy-Baggedy, the island of living stuffed people is fun, but my favorite was the land of the winged cats who live in a cloud castle—like Baum always did with animals, Smith does a good job of making them cats in personality and tone. I also enjoyed the titular sky pyrates. Not pirates, but pyrates—swashbuckling adventurers who help those in need in the sky.

The book also delves into an aspect of the Baum canon I don't think anyone else ever has. On Baum's map of Nonestica that first appeared in Tik-Tok of Oz there was the "Kingdom of Dreams," a location he never mentioned in the text of any of his books. Smith makes it into a creepy mysterious place, home of the Nightmare Sorcerer who's behind the strange clouds. But she doesn't spoil all the mystery, establishing that the Nightmare Sorcerer is an interloper in the land himself, thus leaving open what it might be like without him. I think it was well-handled over all.

I also think the sisters are bit more active in this one than in the previous books, solving problems on the various islands they visit. As someone who very much enjoyed the group problem-solving aspect of Oz novels, I was appreciative of this.  The sisters are whisked to Oz with their dad, but Smith has his transformed into a (non-talking) dog in short order, meaning that though he contributes, the sisters' choices still drive the narrative. Unfortunately, I did find that as the story came to an end, things kind of got too big for the girls to handle, and Glinda and to lesser extent the sky pyrate captains very much took over while the girls watched. It's a tricky thing to do in an Oz book, I think—make a threat big enough to be exciting, but not involve people like Glinda and Ozma in the resolution. (I also didn't feel like Glinda's defeat of the Nightmare Sorcerer was very climactic; why not do that back at the beginning of the book?)

I found the wrap-up to the whole trilogy decently satisfying, though there were still some threads left open. We know what happened to Dorothy, but I didn't really get why the sisters thought they were related to her. It seems to me there's a clear space for a fourth book, still: the girls themselves flag this up when they point out at the end they didn't have an underwater adventure yet, which would tie into the subplot of Dori meeting a mermaid in both Emerald Wand and Trouble Under. Furthermore, the book ends with the girls' dad knowing they've travelled to Oz, but their mom still in disbelief. Surely that was the direction of the possible fourth book: their mom being dragged along this time and learning that magic is real. Though how would Rik have fit in? The end of the book also promises he and the other Nome boys will join the sky pyrates and possible learn some discipline. On top of all that, this book briefly introduces another American kid book drawn into Oz, a deaf boy named Liu, and Dori and Em speculate it would be fun to go on an adventure with him as well. So there are lots of possible directions for more! I would read them; I feel like these books were on an upward trajectory.

My kid said they liked it. I think they were particularly into the sky cats. 

Kim McFarland's illustrations are... okay. Like with William Stout's in the first two, there's not many of them, and like with those, they're often portraity instead of dynamic. But I wonder if that was a deliberate choice in trying to match the first two books. We do learn from the cover that Dori and Em are Black (this was not clearly indicated in the previous books' pictures, nor stated in the prose), which I think makes them the first Black children in any Oz book I've ever read. I don't think McFarland is as good an illustrator as Stout though, even if I wasn't very into his portraity style. Hers is more... DeviantArt, I guess?

Oh, one other thing. There's a bit (clearly inspired by Ozma of Oz) where the characters have to find a transformed Dorothy in a storeroom. When they are looking for her, they first find a phoenix who bursts into flames and then flies away. Glinda says it's nothing to do with their adventure, but someone else's—either an end or a beginning. I am guessing this is a tie into another Sherwood Smith book, but don't know which one! She did write a book called The Phoenix in Flight, but I think that's sf. She later wrote a quartet of novels called The Phoenix Feather; was she anticipating that?

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Back in July 2021, I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz aloud to my kid. They were almost 3 at the time... now they're almost 7, and we've read sixty-two of them! We've read every one of the Famous Forty, plus all the "Borderlands" books and any Oz novel by a Royal Historian and/or with some kind of imprimatur from either the Oz Club or the Baum Trust. I was optimistic when we started, but would never have guessed we'd be going four years later at a rate of fifteen per year! Of course, they don't even remember those early books directly anymore, though the first seven or so they've re-experienced a couple times via various adaptions (movies, audiobooks, the Shanower/Young comics), so they know what happened in those ones. But I think there's a big wasteland of memory from Tik-Tok onward; I'm not sure when you reach a point where they clearly do remember the books again. Are they the only kid in the world whose conception of Oz is primarily drawn from Oz Club publications? Imagine remembering Ozmapolitan of Oz better than Tin Woodman!

I'm not sure if they so much like it as think that reading Oz books is just a way of life. Maybe someday they will read them on their own, and get to experience those early books for themselves.

Next up in sequence: ???

* I know the purpose of Smith's books was to tie into Baum's Oz books specifically, but I am a bit disappointed we didn't get at least references to some of the many floating islands that Ruth Plumly Thompson introduced in her Oz novels: the Skyle of Un, Umbrella Island, and Kapurta. I guess the grand unified Oz sky island novel remains to be written. (Actually, I think all of the relevant novels were under copyright in 2014, and two of them still are. It's the kind of thing Oziana could do... except that while they have the right to reference all the Famous Forty novels, they don't have the rights to reference Sherwood Smith's!)

Reading Trouble Under Oz Aloud to My Kid

Trouble Under Oz is the second Oz book by Sherwood Smith and William Stout, and a direct sequel to their first, The Emerald Wand of Oz. Elements left hanging at the end of the previous one—the mysterious clouds hovering over Oz, Dorothy's disappearance—continue to be referenced, though not resolved; the big continuing element here is Rikiki, better known as "Rik," the son of the old Nome King, Ruggedo. Here, he returns to the Nome Kingdom to attempt to claim the throne from his father's usurper, Kaliko. Ozma summons one of the two sisters from the first book, Dori, to accompany Rik on his journey, wanting someone friendly to Oz to keep an eye on the situation.

There's a game you can play with Ruth Plumly Thompson's Oz novels, where you try to figure out what Baum book she had recently reread before writing her own. Sometimes it's quite obvious, such as she must have reread Patchwork Girl before writing Ojo in Oz. Other times, the need to reread is less direct, but you can see it in the vibes; I maintain she probably reread Sky Island before writing Speedy in Oz, based on how the books overlap in their overall approach.

Trouble Under Oz by Sherwood Smith
illustrated by William Stout

Published: 2006
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: March–May 2025

You can play this game with Trouble Under Oz, too, though in this case it's pretty easy. While Emerald Wand didn't have a lot of specific references to Baum's Oz novels (other than some iconography from the first), Trouble is replete with details from previous books that most later Oz authors have not follow up on. Of course, there's a lot of Nome stuff here: the mechanical giant guarding the Nome Kingdom from Ozma of Oz, the neighboring kingdoms of the Nomes from Emerald City, the two Nome spies (the Long-Eared Hearer and the Lookout) from Tik-Tik of Oz, and Klik the Nome chamberlain and Prince Inga of Pingaree (whose parents were prisoners of the Nomes) from Rinkitink in Oz. Thompson nor any of the later Oz writers ever came back to very specific details like this; Klik doesn't pop up in any of her novels, as far as I know. On top of this, just like how Ruggedo sends our protagonists down a tube to the other side of the Earth in Tik-Tok, here Kaliko sends our protagonists down a slide to a deep underground location in Trouble Under Oz—specifically, to the same underground location Dorothy and her friends visited in Dorothy and the Wizard, the Land of the Mangaboos.

I guess this was probably part of the mandate; it seems like in writing Oz books authorized by the "Baum Family Trust," Smith was aiming to write ones that were particularly Baumish. I think it works for the most part. I've always liked the Nomes, and Smith weaves details about them from Ozma, Emerald City, Tik-Tok, and Rinkitink into a coherent whole, as well as adding her own. For the first time (since Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, anyway), we see Nome children, and we hear about Nome women for the first time ever. Smith has a good handle on the Nomes, I think, particularly Kaliko, who I've always enjoyed, especially when reading aloud. A lot of the details were lost on my kid, though; it was back in April 2022 that we read Rinkitink, almost half their life ago! So references to the three pearls of Pingaree didn't really resonate. 

That said, when Dori, Rik, and Inga were dropped into the Land of the Mangaboos, my kid instantly recognized where they were before the text actually said, not because they actually remembered Dorothy and the Wizard (which we read back when they were three, almost four years ago), but because around Christmas they read the Shanower/Young comic adaptation of it. This stuff, to be honest, seemed a bit like padding to me (particularly the appearance of another group of mermaid that Dori helps), but my kid got a kick out of recognizing the locations from that book, and would tell me things about them before they came up in the story, such as about the bears of the Valley of Voe.

The meat of the book is the stuff in the Nome Kingdom: Kaliko immediately abdicates in favor of Rik, but it turns out that the Nomes have a plan—several competing plans, in fact. Dori and Inga must help Rik navigate them and stay safe themselves. Overall, it's a pretty enjoyable book; I found it moved faster than Smith's first one, and I appreciated the focus on Rik. I did think that, much like the first book, it set something up in terms of character it didn't quite deliver on. I feel like Rik ought to have learned or grown from his experience, especially from the contrast with Inga, but that Smith didn't totally land it. Still, I enjoyed it.

Like in the first book, Stout's illustrations are sparse and too portrait-y. Things that would be interesting to draw are often left unillustrated; where are Rik's friends? On the other hand, some things illustrated are so random I feel like probably he drew the picture first and Smith found a way to work it into the narrative during revisions, such as a Nome warrior who does nothing at all and a patchwork castle that Dori flies over. (Is this in Patch from Nome King?)

Next up in sequence: Sky Pyrates over Oz

Reading The Emerald Wand of Oz Aloud to My Kid

In 2005, a major publisher released an Oz book, one consistent with the Famous Forty (or, at least, the original fourteen by Baum)—I am pretty sure this was an unprecedented event, as any major post-FF Oz book has been a "noncanonical" take like Wicked or Dorothy Must Die, and any canon-consistent book has been a small-press release from a publisher like Hungry Tiger Press or Books of Wonder or the Oz Club. But through book packager Byron Preiss, HarperCollins obtained the rights to brand their new Oz book as licensed by the Baum Family Trust.

To be honest, it's not totally clear to me what everyone involved got out of this. Everything in Baum's original books is in the public domain now, so what did HarperCollins need from the Baum Family Trust? Was it just a marketing hook? If so, it's hard for me to imagine it was really that much of a draw. The book was written by a legitimate fantasy author, Sherwood Smith, who had written dozens of fantasy novels before Emerald Wand, unlike most canon-consistent post-FF authors, who are Oz fans first and writers second. Two more would follow; the first two were illustrated by William Stout, who I guess is famous but I can't claim to have heard of.

Anyway, I've long been curious about it, so when my six-year-old kid and I finished all the other somewhat "official" Oz books written by Royal Historians and/or released, we continued on to these. The books feel less calibrated for reading aloud, though, than Baum and his imitators; the chapters have no titles, the chapter lengths are variable, and the illustration density is particularly low, not even one per chapter. I think there's a one-hundred-page stretch here with no pictures at all! It seemed to me this was more aimed at a middle-grade audience reading on their own. (Which certainly is an audience of a traditional Oz novel, but not the only one.)

The Emerald Wand of Oz by Sherwood Smith
illustrated by William Stout

Published: 2005
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: February–March 2025

Aside from a confusing opening chapter (more on that later), the book focuses on Em and Dori, two sisters from modern Kansas, supposedly related to Dorothy Gale. They are children of recently divorced parents, and Dori has dealt with this by retreating into fantasy and imagination; she's a big fan of the Oz books, and sends her toy ponies on adventures. Em has dealt with this by treating everything factually and rationally; she keeps her toy ponies in pristine condition on the shelf. The two are magically whisked to Oz during a tornado, where they end up in a country ruled by unicorns attended to by doting children. (I thought that the geography is right for this to be Unicorners from Ruth Plumly Thompson's Ojo in Oz, but double-checking, it looks like Unicorners is in the Munchkin country, and the valley here is in the Quadling.) Initially Dori is thrilled and Em is not, but both girls come to agree that it's an unpleasant place and attempt to make their escape, which takes some doing, including assistance from a friendly mermaid and a mysterious vagabond boy named Rik.

After this, the girls plus Rik travel to Glinda's palace to seek her help in getting home, only to discover that Glinda has become vapid; a wicked witch named Bastina (the niece of the Wicked Witch of the West) has cast a spell on Ozma, rendering her and all loyal to her empty-headed and impressionable, though this doesn't affect magically animated beings. Thus, the girls must work together with the Scarecrow, Scraps, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the Glass Cat to travel to Bastinda's castle and undo her enchantment, all the while trying to see how much they can trust Rik... who turns out to be Nome! (Specifically, the son of the original-but-deposed Nome King, Ruggedo f.k.a. Roquat. By this point, I think Ruggedo's a cactus according to Handy Mandy, but I don't believe these books ever specify his whereabouts.)

As always, my six-year-old seemed to have a good time; I think they particularly enjoyed the shenanigans involved in the battle against Bastinda and her dimwitted gecko guards. 

I found the book a bit frustrating because it promises something it doesn't quite deliver. The opening of the book really hinges on character conflict between Em and Dori, Em's logic versus Dori's imagination. One imagines, then, that the book ought to resolve this conflict... but it doesn't, not really. At a certain point, the girls are just getting along and everything is fine. It's frustrating, because it seems like the ingredients are all there: obviously Dori turns out to be right, when Oz is real, but surely Em should also turn out to be right, and I feel like the obvious moment for this is when the girls are in Unicorn Valley. Like, Dori's love of fantasy should have her seduced by the glamor of the unicorns in a way that Em is able to see through, and the girls learn to pool their strengths. But this doesn't quite happen; by the end, Em has just come around to Dori's side and they get along, but there's not really any moment or moments that push them there. It's frustrating because the book is so close on that score.

Smith's Oz feels a bit less whimsical than Baum's; she includes his whimsical characters, but her own additions to the mythos feel like very familiar ones to a twentieth-century children's fantasy fan: unicorns and mermaids and hints of dragons. It feels like Oz for the My Little Pony generation. (This was before Friendship is Magic, so I guess I mean the OG MLP generation; Smith would have been in her thirties when that came out.) There's nothing like the Dainty China Country or the Wheelers or what-have-you here. Some of the emphasis on using magic to perform mundane tasks (like doing dishes or washing clothes) feels a bit Harry Potter, which I suppose is right; this came out at the same time as the sixth novel, at the height of Pottermania. It feels like a more "conventional" fantasy realm than the one Baum gave us. I think the result of this is, unfortunately, that Smith's Oz doesn't feel like as "fun" a place for its main characters to travel through as Baum's. There's a joy in crossing (most of) Baum's landscapes that's largely lacking here.

I was intrigued by Smith's hints about the wider Oz world; Bastinda apparently went to some kind of magical school, but this isn't spelled out. Again, this is probably a Harry Potter–inspired thing, but Ruth Plumly Thompson did allude to a school for wicked magic-users in one of her books! I wanted to know more about the origins and motivations of Bastinda than we got here.

Perhaps we will, or perhaps Smith intended to, anyway. There are indications here of a larger story arc; Dorothy is missing, and Glinda and Ozma are unable to locate her with the Magic Picture or the Great Book of Records. There's also a mysterious cloud with evil faces in it that occasionally bedevils our heroes. Rik, too, is set up to return—he is a focal character in Smith's next book, Trouble Under Oz in fact. I enjoyed Rik, and Smith does a good job pacing out the clues as to Rik's true nature; my six-year-old picked up on it immediately before it was revealed. On the other hand, as alluded to above, I found the opening chapter frustrating. It contains an overwhelming amount of exposition about a magic crystal ball in Dori's possession, and I'm not sure why, as this all needs to be reexplained to Dori later on. My six-year-old—usually quite good with this kind of thing!—got confused pretty easily. Why not have us find out this stuff as Dori does? Feels like something an editor misguidedly demanded Smith add to the book.

The illustrations by Stout are pretty stately, usually portraits instead of scenes. I can certainly see their technical competence, but they feel devoid of the Ozzian whimsy that suffuses the work of Denslow, Shanower, and especially Neill.

Next up in sequence: Trouble Under Oz