Reading Merry Go Round in Oz Aloud to My Kid

Merry Go Round in Oz by Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren McGraw
illustrated by Dick Martin

Another landmark Oz book for me and my kid—the last of the Famous Forty! This one was already in my collection, so I did own it as a kid... but it's the only installment in the Famous Forty to not appear on my c. 1997 list of all Oz books, so apparently I didn't know about it as of then. The only memory I have retained of it is the first chapter, where Oregon orphan Robin Brown grabs the brass ring on a merry-go-round and is transported to Oz; literally none of the rest of the book was even remotely familiar as I reread it. This is a shame because as an adult reader, I loved it. This was definitely my favorite post-Baum Oz novel, and to be honest, there's more than a few Baum novels I would say it exceeds too.

Originally published: 1963
Acquired: 1998?
Read aloud: July 2024

The plot owes more to Ruth Plumly Thompson's Oz than Baum's in some ways, reminding of Grampa in Oz in particular, but also Kabumpo in Oz or Purple Prince: the prince of an eccentric, vaguely fairly tale Oz kingdom must go on a quest to save his people. (Though unlike in those books, there's no romance element to the quest.) This isn't really the kind of thing Baum went in for, by and large. In this case, the jousting- and genealogy-obsessed Munchkin enclave of Halidom has lost three Golden Circlets that grant its inhabitants strength, intelligence, and skill in handicrafts. Prince Gules goes on a quest to reacquire them, though as he lacks both intelligence and strength, the quest is really being managed by the page Fess, who comes from the neighboring kingdom of Troth; they are accompanied by Fess's pet Flittermouse (half-mouse, half-bat), Gules's steed Fred (who ostentatiously styles himself Federigo, but is secretly descended from a plow-horse), and a fairy Unicorn (supposedly the only unicorn in Oz, but a footnote reminds us there are other unicorns in Oz that the people of Halidom don't know about; see Magic of Oz and Ojo).

Merry Go Round also merges in notes of Gnome King, Yellow Knight, or especially Speedy in its use of a boy American protagonist who gets to Oz in circumstances that are admittedly somewhat dubious and underexplained. Robin Brown is an orphan in foster care who grabs a magic brass ring on a merry-go-round, transporting him to Oz, but also (for reasons never explained) the merry-go-round horse he was riding, which comes to life. He dubs her "Merry Go Round," and he and Merry are of course swept up into a number of adventures as they try to get to the Emerald City, where hopefully Princess Ozma will be able to transport them home and make Merry into a Real Horse.

At first, we go back and forth between the two parties; eventually the book adds in Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, who are (initially) setting out to see the Easter Bunny to order Easter eggs for an upcoming Easter party in the Emerald City. First Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion encounter the party from Halidom; then all three groups converge in the city of Roundabout, whose inhabitants think Robin is their prophesied king.

I don't think it's a coincidence that coauthor Eloise Jarvis McGraw is basically the only post-Baum "Royal Historian" to have had a career as a children's author outside of the Oz books; indeed, she was a Newbery Honor recipient three different times! More than any other Oz book, this one actually cares about the characters and development of its protagonists. Robin, who always feels passed over, must learn to speak up if he's to help Merry. Gules must learn how to act as a leader. Fess must manage a group of people without letting them know they're being managed. Flitter must learn to be brave. Fred must learn to not be so vain. Merry must learn what a "Real Horse" actually is. All of the McGraws' original characters have little arcs, and while Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion don't really change, she does well by them, too. While the McGraws are clearly imitating Thompson, this is a depth of characterization and theme that Thompson herself never achieved (except, perhaps, in Kabumpo). She's also a more subtle writer than some of her predecessors, with more stuff communicated through allusion at times; I would say the reading level is pitched slightly higher than most Famous Forty books.

It's a large set of characters, and I do think my kid found this a bit hard to keep track of at first; plus, there's a lot of exposition in the first Halidom chapter, and conversely, the lack of direct explanation at some points meant I had to spell things out. But unlike some other Oz books with large casts (e.g., Hidden Valley), the McGraws are very careful to give everyone something meaningful to do, both in terms of little bits of business throughout, also in that every character meaningfully contributes to the problem-solving multiple times. There's, for example, some good gags about the vegetarian food the Cowardly Lion is forced to eat in the Easter Bunny's kingdom, and the escape from the Land of Good Children is an excellent sequence, pure Oz problem solving combined with pure Oz whimsy.

I came to enjoy every single one of these characters, and it seems a shame that though McGraw made two returns to Oz, I don't think she ever followed up on any of these characters. I want to see Robin and Merry come into their own, or what Fess is like as he grows older! (I have a theory about him...) There were a lot of fun, distinct voices to do here. I of course particularly loved doing the over-the-top princely declamations of Prince Gules. The end of the book is good, too; things are wrapped up for everyone quite nicely.

I think it's a long book. (I looked around for a list of Oz book word counts but couldn't find one; some enterprising fan must have done this, though.) It runs the usual twenty-ish chapters, and several Oz books are longer in terms of page count, but I felt like the typeface was smaller and chapters often took almost thirty minutes to read aloud instead of the usual fifteen/twenty. Despite this, we read it less than three weeks (we usually average an Oz book a month) because my kid kept asking for extra chapters, so they must have been into it. They were very into the untangling of the books' two prophecies,* and the finding of the three circlets, and they very much liked the journey map contained in the front of book. I think it was slightly over their head in some spots, in a way no Oz book we've read has been for a while, but in a good way.(The only thing to not like in this regard is more an issue for the child reader than the adult one; by the time the key character of Sir Greves returned in the last couple chapters, I don't think my kid remembered him from the first couple chapters at all!)

Dick Martin illustrates, the first of several books by him we'll be reading. I didn't care for his take on Dorothy, and he's no John R. Neill, but his style is well-suited to the tone of the book. Like many of the late Famous Forty books, my big issue with the pictures is that there ought to be more of them!

Next up in sequence: Yankee in Oz

* Come to think of it, this is a bit of a Thompson trope too, but unlike Thompson, who often seemed to fudge them, the McGraws spend some time at the end of the book spelling out exactly how all the prophecies actually worked out. Thompson clearly made her books up as she went along, but this one is obviously carefully planned and plotted.

Reading The Hidden Valley of Oz Aloud to My Kid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up in sequence: The Wicked Witch of Oz

Reading The Shaggy Man of Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Shaggy Man of Oz by Jack Snow
illustrated by Frank Kramer

There are some who praise Jack Snow as a writer for his more Baumian vibe, preferring him to Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neill. I don't remember his books at all, though I know I read them when I was a kid; I got them from the library so I only read them the once. When I found my spreadsheet of Oz books from when I was twelve, I rated both of Snow's books 10/10, so clearly I myself was among those who enjoyed them. But reading them as an adult, it's less that Snow has a Baumiam vibe and more that he just rips L. Frank Baum off... while not really capturing what made Baum successful to begin with.

Originally published: 1949
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: April–May 2024

It is pretty clear that to write The Shaggy Man of Oz, Snow must have reread Road to Oz, Emerald City, and John Dough and the Cherub. Road because Shaggy Man features the Shaggy Man, and that book was the character's introduction; Shaggy Man even, in a classic fanboy move, explains a seeming inconsistency between Road and Tik-Tok of Oz when it comes to the powers of the Love Magnet. But in a different kind of classic fanboy move, Snow can read the text closely enough to reconcile a minor discrepancy but not close enough to get the actual point of the text! In Road, Shaggy initially tells Dorothy that he got the Love Magnet from an Eskimo who gave it to him... but at the end of the book, he admits he actually stole it from a young woman because he felt unloved. If Snow reread Road to write Shaggy Man, he evidently didn't make it all the way to the end, because he presents the original story of the Love Magnet as fact here.

To me, this totally misses the point of not just the Love Magnet, but the Shaggy Man as a character. He's a man who was unloved but came to be loved, and then learned he didn't need this artificial tool to be loved. It's a very common trope for Baum. But there's no hint of that characterization here; in Snow's hands, Shaggy is just a somewhat genial blank slate. There's a weird bit where the Shaggy Man and his young companions, Twink and Tom, supposedly teach a group of people the true meaning of love... but they do so via the Love Magnet, which doesn't create real love at all! I mean, I guess it's very L. Frank Baum in that the book called Shaggy Man of Oz seems very disinterested in the actual Shaggy Man (see also: Tik-Tok, Scarecrow), but it's frustrating. Thompson ignored the Shaggy Man throughout her run on Oz, but despite sticking him the title, Jack Snow might as well be ignoring him too.

We read John Dough and the Cherub immediately prior to Shaggy Man because they have a side character in common, the King of the Fairy Beavers. What this revealed to me, though, was that Snow was basically totally ripping off John Dough. In John Dough, John Dough and the Cherub escape an island via a flying car they steal; in Shaggy Man, Shaggy and his young friends escape an island via a flying car they steal. In John Dough, the characters travel to Hiland; in Shaggy Man, the characters travel to Hightown. (Though Highland is nothing like Hiland; Snow uses the name as a jumping off point but that's it.) In John Dough, the characters are trapped in the Palace of Romance whose inhabitants never stop telling stories; in Shaggy Man, the characters are trapped in the Valley of Romance whose inhabitants never stop watching plays. In John Dough, the King of the Fairy Beavers pops up and solves all the main characters' problems; in Shaggy Man, the King of the Fairy Beavers pops up and solves all the main characters' problems.

My five-year-old seemed to largely enjoy the ways the books coincided; they clearly expected Hightown and Hiland to be the same things, and the Valley of Romance and the Palace of Romance to be so as well, but they soon got over it. To me, though, it was frustrating. Like, I just read this book! And like in Magical Mimics, the supposed main characters contribute little to the resolution of any of their difficulties. The Shaggy Man and his young friends only do one clever thing, using the Love Magnet in the Valley of Romance; it's the King of the Fairy Beavers who figures out a way to cross the Deadly Desert, to breach the Barrier of Invisibility, to defeat Conjo the mischievous wizard who wants to take over as the Wizard of Oz.

Lastly, Snow clearly reread Emerald City because the characters use the Nome King's tunnel from that book... and the King of the Fairy Beavers defeats Conjo the exact same way Ozma defeated the Nome King in Emerald City. It's boring and anticlimactic.

I already complained about the Shaggy Man; on top of that, Twink and Tom are surely the least interesting "American kids whisked to Oz" in all the Famous Forty, below even Zeb. I don't think they did anything striking in the entire book. Bring back Peter and Bob Up!

My five-year-old said they enjoyed it... though I also think they got a lot less excited about it than some other Oz books we've read of late. I also don't like that Snow has many short chapters, as opposed to Baum and Thompson's somewhat fewer but longer ones. If you do one chapter aloud at a time, it means you move through it somewhat slowly, and very little seems to happen. Boy did it drag.

But that's it for Jack Snow, who made just two contributions to the Famous Forty. Next we get someone new again!

Next up in sequence: The Hidden Valley of Oz

Reading The Magical Mimics in Oz Aloud to My Kid

The Magical Mimics in Oz by Jack Snow
illustrated by Frank Kramer

After John R. Neill died, the Oz series took a rest for a couple years, but it returned in 1946 with The Magical Mimics in Oz, by the series's fourth author, Jack Snow, and third artist, Frank Kramer.

Originally published: 1946
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: February–March 2024

Jack Snow was the first person to be a bona fide Oz fan to write an Oz book, and you can tell; it's the kind of book where characters do things like say, "Oh, wasn't the Forest of Burzee where Santa Claus was raised?" so that you know the writer has read The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. (Although, weirdly, he gets the Guardian of the Gates confused with the Soldier with the Green Whiskers. Rookie mistake!) He was also specifically an L. Frank Baum fan; while Neill built on what Thompson had established, Magical Mimics doesn't reference any characters or concepts from after Baum; you could go straight from Glinda of Oz to Magical Mimics without missing a beat. And actually, it would read pretty well; Baum always included some minor characters from the last couple books in his most recent book's celebration scenes, and Lady Aurex from Glinda shows up in this book's. But if you are reading in publication order, Glinda was twenty-six years ago, so the odds are very much against you remembering her! A lot of minor characters that Thompson and Neill hadn't cared for pop up here in minor roles, like Button-Bright and Cap'n Bill. (I did add in a reference to the events of Runaway when reading aloud though; it fit quite naturally into one of Scraps's scenes.)

The premise of Magical Mimics is on the darker end. As always, someone is trying to take over Oz, but it's one of the more successful attempts, like Thompson's Wishing Horse. The Mimics are shapeshifters who want to invade Oz, but can't because of a spell of protection cast by Queen Lurline when she enchanted Oz. What they figure out, though, is that they can replace people who came to Oz after the spell was cast, so when Ozma and Glinda leave Oz on state business, they sneak into the Emerald City and replace Dorothy and the Wizard. Dorothy and the Wizard wake up in prison in Mount Illuso, the Mimics' home, while the residents of the Emerald City go increasingly concerned about Dorothy and the Wizard's strange behavior.

To be honest, I kind of wanted something more creepy and more complex, with Mimics slowly replacing Oz character after Oz character, while some other characters desperately tried to figure out what was going on. As it is, the book is pretty simple: the Mimics replace Dorothy and the Wizard, the other Oz characters wonder why they're acting weird but don't really make any progress or discoveries, meanwhile the real Dorothy and the Wizard meet a fairy who explains everything to them, she takes them back to Oz, and she defeats the Mimics. But perhaps Jack Snow knows his audience better than I do, because my five-year-old kid was totally on edge and nervous even with this very limited threat posed by the Mimics. They did not like that the Mimics replaced Dorothy and the Wizard, and did not like the tense chapter where the Mimic horde invaded the Emerald City and replaced everyone. So I guess it had enough jeopardy for the target audience!

Overall, I thought it was fine. I wish there had been more clever problem-solving by the Oz characters. Much like a Thompson novel, ironically, this one mostly sees the main characters stand around while a previously unknown powerful magic user takes care of everything for them. Dorothy and the Wizard don't do anything interesting to get away from the Mimics; the Emerald City characters don't do anything clever to figure out what the Mimics are up to. Toto turns out to be the real MVP of the novel, instantly realizing Dorothy has been replaced, evading capture by the Mimics, and striking at the Mimic King and Queen when everyone else is paralyzed by indecision. (The Scarecrow also shows some minor cleverness, admittedly, delaying the Mimics until Ozma and Glinda return to deal with them.) Thompson never did much with Toto, so it's nice to see him do some interesting stuff. Snow has the kind of languid pacing Baum often did, as opposed to the frenetic pacing of Thompson and Neill; Oz may be in danger, but Dorothy and the Wizard can still spend two chapters looking at a garden! Snow also captures a lot of Baum's sense of whimsy; both Pineville and the Story Blossom Garden feel like the kinds of places he might have thought of, not Thompson.

I'm sorry to say, though, that not only is Frank Kramer in third place for Famous Forty artists (thus far), it is a very distant third. There is an occasional nice picture (the one of Toto as Sherlock Holmes is fun), but overall most of his illustrations seem to aspire to competent at best. Baum hit gold with both W. W. Denslow and John R. Neill, so it's sad to see the publisher scrimping this time around.

Next up in sequence: John Dough and the Cherub

Reading Lucky Bucky in Oz Aloud to My Son

Lucky Bucky in Oz by John R. Neill

In my write-ups of The Wonder City of Oz and Scalawagons of Oz, I argued that John R. Neill was doing something different to what L. Frank Baum and Ruth Plumly Thompson usually did; if we were to use Farah Mendlesohn's categories, Neill's first two books were more akin to immersive fantasies than the usual portal/quest fantasies of an Oz book. His third and (sort of) final Oz novel, however, sees him revert to a classic Oz formula: an American child comes to Oz and needs to journey to the Emerald City. Neill's implementation of this formula probably owes more to Thompson than to Baum; the explanation for the trip is far-fetched even by Oz standards (Lucky Bucky is on a tugboat whose boiler explodes, propelling him through the air all the way to the Nonentic [sic] Ocean) and he gains a faithful animal companion (in this case, a living wooden whale). Shades of Yellow Knight or Speedy, perhaps.

Originally published: 1942
Acquired: October 2023
Read aloud: December 2023–January 2024

The book starts quite promisingly. Bucky Jones lands on a volcanic island—one that belches out foodstuffs and is inhabited by bakers perennially under siege by pirates looking to steal their pies; that is to say, "pie-rates." The pirates are using the wooden whale Davy Jones as their base of operations, and soon they end up stranded on the island while Bucky ends up on the whale. Bucky wants to go home, and Davy (who assumes the two must be cousins) says their best bet is the journey to the Emerald City and ask Ozma. Davy must travel up and down rivers, over land, and even across the Deadly Desert to make this journey. Davy is a bit dour but faithful, Bucky is eternally optimistic. It's a good pairing and a classic formula.

Unfortunately, it's much like Thompson's work in another way; it's one of those books where nothing very interesting seems to happen on the journey. Bucky and Davy arrive somewhere, they leave, they arrive somewhere, they leave. There is very little actual danger and even less cleverness; the one time you might imagine them having to do something interesting (when an underground river takes them into the Nome Kingdom), they get bailed out by Number Nine (whose been monitoring their progress on the Wizard's tattle-scope) via the Ambassa-door. When they get to the Deadly Desert, Polychrome randomly shows up to use the rainbow to help them across, in a scene ripped straight out of Purple Prince. Indeed, the whole set-up of intriguing characters on an utterly forgettable journey comes is highly reminiscent of that book. By the time my son and I got to the end and looked at Bucky's journey on the Oz Club map, he couldn't remember what the Zerons they met in an early chapter were—and neither could I.

Meanwhile, in the Emerald City, Ozma initiates a very period-appropriate public works project, putting the people of the city to work painting Oz's history on the walls of her palace (or of the city itself, Neill seems to get them confused). The Wizard supplies magic paint, and Jack Pumpkinhead paints such a good picture of Mombi that the picture comes to life and flies off. Later, so do a bunch of other sorcerers and witches from Oz history (these all being original characters) and dozens of paintings of the Wizard. This is fun stuff, but ultimately goes nowhere. Mombi is pretty easily defeated, and even though she hides in Davy Jones, never actually threatens our heroes.

Still, in the usual Neill fashion, one has the sense of Oz as a bizarre place where anything can happen. When Davy Jones reaches the core of the Winkie Country, he finds the rivers abruptly end. This turns out to be because the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman had the Wizard get rid of them, because they were constantly falling in them! (Recalling, it seems, Little Wizard Stories, among others.) Weird things are always happening in Oz, even between books. There are flying bellows-birds, and a country of uncles (including the Uncle Sam, which confused my son, as he's just called Bucky's uncle, and he wanted to know how Bucky's uncle got there). We learn the Tin Woodman has six nieces, who all married tinsmiths; I want to know more about his extended family! We learn that there was a time when Ozma, Glinda, and the Wizard used to hunt witches together (between Dorothy and the Wizard and Road to Oz?), and that a sorcerer named Old Trickolas Om was the worst to ever bedevil them, besides Mombi herself; the exploits of many of these other witches and sorcerers are briefly detailed, and we even learn that many dark magicians inhabit the Winkie wilderness yet, assaulting innocent travelers. Wow. What I like about Neill is that he just goes for it... even when, admittedly, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

(There is some very bad internal continuity in this book; many events simply cannot happen in the sequence described.  At one point, Number Nine sees Davy Jones enter the Nome Kingdom and travels there to intervene. Then he returns to the Emerald City, and the painting of Mombi comes to life, and it takes refuge in Davy around the same time he and Bucky meet the Zerons... which happened before they went to the Nome Kingdom. Time travel? Wonder City received a massive edit... but on the other hand, Lucky Bucky didn't receive one it desperately needed.)

As always, though, my son enjoyed it immensely. The sheer exuberance of Neill's Oz is perfect for a five-year-old, and he really liked the ending, where the bakers' volcano is moved to a lake near the Emerald City, and Davy gets a job delivering its wares—plus, the Wizard uses the volcano to send up firework displays at night. Why not? 

Here's my son's picture of Lucky Bucky:

(I for one would have liked to have known why Bucky abruptly decides he'd rather live in Oz than go home. This book overall is better than Scalawagons for an adult reader... but still not up to much. Certainly reading it aloud is the way to go, though.)

Next up in sequence: The Runaway in Oz

Reading The Scalawagons of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Scalawagons of Oz by John R. Neill

Back when I wrote up Neill's first Oz book, I wrote that "the thing I like about more than anything else is that it might be the first Oz book to give us a sense of what it's like to live in Oz." From the author's note at the beginning of his second, one discovers that this was in fact his explicit intention:

Originally published: 1941
Acquired: October 2023
Read aloud: November–December 2023

Day by day stirring events happen in the Land of OZ which we are compelled to let pass. No one will ever know of them.
     It would be impossible to tell you all that happens in a whole year.
     This book is the record of less than a week.

Basically, strange things are constantly happening in Oz; it's not that the books we get annually are the only significant events, rather, they are but the tip of the iceberg. (This is a handy get out for seeming continuity errors, of course. Why is Ojo an elephant boy now? Why is Jack Pumpkinhead trying to make Scraps into a proper lady? Why is the Scarecrow ruler of the Munchkins? Well, presumably, very exciting adventures occupying the other fifty-one weeks of the year would answer all of these questions.) The people of Oz are constantly going through wacky adventures... and, of course, finding it all immensely fun. Wouldn't you, if you couldn't get hurt and you knew your fairy queen could sort out any real problem with her magic belt? Indeed, Scalawagons kind of provides an answer to a problem that plagued Ruth Plumly Thompson's novels, where Oz was always coming within moment of being conquered by honestly pretty pathetic outside forces. Why shouldn't Ozma let these folks get as far as they can get, when she know ultimately everything will turn out fine? If everyone everyone who's not her gets a chance to stop the villains, they get something to do!

The premise of Scalawagons is that the Wizard invents self-driving cars, which he calls "scalawagons," and sets up a factory to produce them on Carrot Mountain in the Quadling Country with Tik-Tok as superintendent. Unfortunately, a creature called the Bell-Snickle fills them up with flabbergas, making them do all kinds of crazy things and fly away, meaning the cars are no-shows at the party devoted to their reveal. Jenny Jump, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Sawhorse set out to recover them, but in the meantime the scalawagons have crossed the Deadly Desert and run into the Mifkits, a tribe of strange creatures from outside Oz. (The Mifkits are from Baum's non-Oz novel John Dough and the Cherub, though based on their location and the fact that they can throw their heads, Neill seems to be thinking of the Scoodlers from Road to Oz.)

Like Wonder City, the main sense this book gives is that we should wonder at the weirdness of Oz, for there's little actual danger or stakes. And we do get some fun stuff: the Lollies and their Pops, who are living lollipops; water fairies that can be used to clean floors; a living clock who torments people who are late to work; living medicine bottles that are so desperate to be used they'll break your leg so they can fix it; the Winkie Woods being a place that literally winks on and off; bell-men who are literally men with bells on their head, who fly through the air having lost their home of Boboland (from Rinkitink in Oz, clearly Neill was working from the map this time out); living forests that travel the countryside in search of water.

But though my son always seemed quite engaged (indeed, he rated the book four out of four stars), I found it often tedious and pointless. One feels like Jenny's attempt to find the scalawagons ought to be the spine of whole book, but Neill must have run out of ideas because she catches up to them about halfway through and bringing the wayward machines back home is remarkably easy. From there, a bunch of random small encounters pad out the book, such as a stray Mifkit (Scoodler?) popping up in Oz and being given gainful employment, and the return of the Bell-Snickle and its doomed attempt to capture the Emerald City of Oz with an army of trees. Two different chapters are made up of nothing more than the Sawhorse running dangerously fast for no real reason; at one point, the Tin Woodman freezes up and can't be saved because there is allegedly no oil in the whole Emerald City. A bunch of animals go on a rampage for the second book in a row.

The characters, especially in the second half of the book, keep telling each other how much fun they're having, Neill presumably hoping this will trick the reader into thinking they're having fun. As I alluded to above, Ozma doesn't intervene to stop the Bell-Snickle from attacking the Emerald City so that Dorothy, Trot, Betsy, Jellia, and Jenny can try to stop it... but they don't actually do anything, they just follow it around in their scalawagons.

And though Neill draws, as usual, some delightful images (the Soldier with the Green Whiskers holding the detached head of the Mifkit by the tongue was my favorite), I felt like there were fewer of them than in Wonder City. Altogether, the book is maybe a tad more coherent than Wonder City... which is probably to its detriment, as it was impossible to be bored reading Wonder City, but I was fairly often bored here.

But, like I said, my five-year-old son seemed to enjoy it throughout, so I guess Neill knew his target demographic. The only thing he didn't like was the Bell-Snickle's assault on the scalawagon factory. And, you know, I continue to be appreciative that Neill remembers many of Baum's characters that Thompson clearly forgot about, like Em and Henry, the Sawhorse, and Tik-Tok, while keeping hers in play too (Captain Salt and Sir Hokus both get a few good lines).

Next up in sequence: Lucky Bucky in Oz

Reading The Wonder City of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Wonder City of Oz by John R. Neill

After Ruth Plumly Thompson made her (sort of) last contribution to the Oz series with Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, publisher Reilly & Lee invited longtime illustrator John R. Neill to write the Oz book for 1940 himself. At that point, he had been illustrating Oz for thirty-six years—surely there was no one else more qualified?

Originally published: 1940
Acquired: ~1996?
Read aloud: October–November 2023

Well, the resulting book has a pretty terrible reputation. Everyone out there seems to dislike it; when I recently found the list of Oz books I had read as of 1997, I learned I had rated it the lowest of the Famous Forty. Even Reilly & Lee infamously disliked it, as upon receiving the manuscript, they tasked an editor to basically rewrite the whole thing. Eric Shanower informs us, "You have to read to at least chapter six of the published book before you reach a sentence that JRN actually wrote." As he admits, "Not that JRN’s original manuscript is any great shakes. It displays all the reason[s] that the editors at Reilly & Lee thought it needed an overhaul. However, I’m not sure it needed THIS overhaul."

But, perhaps this book more than any other shows the benefit of reading the Oz books aloud a chapter or two at a time to a five-year-old. Because when you do this, The Wonder City of Oz is hugely enjoyable!

The protagonist of Wonder City is Jenny Jump, a sixteen-year-old (I think) girl who lives by herself in New Jersey. She catches a leprechaun stealing her pepper cheese and transfixes him with her glare, which means he has to grant her a wish. She wishes to be turned into a fairy, but halfway through the process she blinks, meaning she's only half fairy (one fairy foot, one fairy eye, eight fairy fingers, and so on). When she stamps her fairy foot, she's propelled through the air to Oz, crashing down in the middle of Ozma's birthday parade. Soon, she's running a style shop and running in an "ozlection" to replace Ozma as ruler of Oz and helping fend off an invasion of shoe-eating sinister sponges from the Deadly Desert and going on an expedition to a chocolate star in an ozoplane with Jack Pumpkinhead and Scraps and much more.

Neill's Oz (or maybe his editor's Oz, but let's just say Neill's) is a weird, madcap place. If you're not careful, you can sew your mouth shut with magic thread; when you cry, your tears are candy; if you throw your cap into the air but forget to let go, you'll go up into the air with it; you might meet a voice that has lost his man; houses are alive enough to pick residents and battle each other and defend themselves from attack; you can train shoes to perform music; it's a legitimate worry that if someone wins an election in a landslide, the landslide could be strong enough to destroy a city. Though substantially more madcap, it does remind me a bit of the way things were back in the first book, before Baum had codified the rules of Oz so much and a Scarecrow could just come to life with no explanation. It's all the kind of thing that might annoy an older reader, but made my five-year-old cackle in delight.

The book technically has an overaching plot in the ozlection, but it's not really the point. It also has one in terms of Jenny's temper coming under control, though that one reads pretty badly to modern readers—first, the Wizard and the leprechaun conspire to de-age Jenny so that she's nicer (and regresses to before she obtained her fairy gifts), and then at the end, the Wizard removes a lot of Jenny's personality traits to make her nicer! The first intervention genuinely upset my son, and the second I edited out. He was also really upset when Jenny lost the ozlection (he really wanted her to beat Ozma!) but that nicely paralleled Jenny's own anger; she goes on a rampage and ends up releasing a bunch of ferocious plant-animals (e.g., tiger-lilies, foxgloves) on the city. I changed it so that seeing the results of her rampage caused Jenny to realize she had to manage her anger more productively—a lesson our five-year-old needs to learn, at least. (Though when I asked him, "do you ever get really angry when things don't go your way?" he claimed not!)

One of the weird things is that the Wizard suddenly has a penchant for disguises in this book; the commenters at the "Book of Common Focus" on Pumperdink point out that this is probably Neill being inspired by the MGM film of the previous year, where Frank Morgan plays several Emerald City characters, all of whom might be the Wizard in disguise. And it does kind of fit with things the Wizard does in Wonderful Wizard, Dorothy and the Wizard, and Little Wizard Stories. Here, he disguises himself as a customer at Jenny's style shop, as a broom man in Ozma's palace, and a doctor; seemingly, this is all to check out Number Nine, Jenny's Munchkin assistant who, by the time of the next book, is the Wizard's own assistant. That said, it comes across as a weird obsession; at one point he apologizes for not having enough time to put on a disguise, and when General Jinjur recognizes him, he teleports her back to her farm so she can't give him away.

Speaking of Jinjur, one of the delights of the book is that Neill (or his editor) seems to have remembered a lot of characters that Thompson either forgot about or abandoned. Jinjur has only a brief appearance but it's her first one since Tin Woodman, I think. We get dialogue for Uncle Henry and Aunt Em for the first time since Baum died. The Guardian of the Gates and the Wogglebug get a few meaningful scenes. We even get a pair of excellent scenes for Sir Hokus, Neill totally ignoring (wisely in my opinion) the really boring fate to which Thompson sentenced him in Yellow Knight. Here, he is just having fun chasing a two-headed dragon around the Emerald City, but he and the dragon pause their game to help Number Nine rid Jenny's style shop of an infestation of Nomes.

Of course, Neill always draws great pictures, but these are his best since the color plates were dropped, in my opinion. Clearly he starts from the pictures and then works out story events to justify them—and what better way could there be for him to work? How else would we ever get a two-page spread of Jack Pumpkinhead as conductor to a choir of shoes? I don't care how flimsy the justification is if I get to see pictures like this.

It's a wacky book, but probably the thing I like about more than anything else is that it might be the first Oz book to give us a sense of what it's like to live in Oz. Jenny travels to Oz, but beyond that, she doesn't do the usual Oz thing of questing somewhere. The whole book is set in or near the Emerald City, and just highlights the crazy, bizarre things that seemingly happen there on a daily basis. Life in Oz is a constant parade of delightful strangeness.

Next up in sequence: The Scalawagons 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