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

Reading The Rundelstone of Oz Aloud to My Kid

After The Forbidden Fountain of Oz, Eloise McGraw returned to Oz one last time, making The Rundelstone of Oz the last book written by a "Famous Forty" author. It was originally published in a periodical called Oz-story with pictures by Eric Shanower, and then republished as a standalone volume by Hungry Tiger Press with more illustrations.

Rundelstone is an unusual Oz novel; aside from the opening chapter (set in the Emerald City), the entire book takes place in the confines of a single village, and most of it even takes place on the grounds of a single castle! Despite this, it still manages to feel pretty Ozzy. The protagonist is a living puppet, part of a performing troupe of living puppets, but Poco doesn't, say, desire to be a real boy or anything; he just is a living puppet, the kind of thing you might expect to find in Oz. Poco enjoys his life, but suffers because of the cruel maestroissimo of the troupe, its one human member, who bullies all the puppets, but especially Poco.

The Rundelstone of Oz by Eloise McGraw
illustrated by Eric Shanower

Originally published: 2000
Acquired: July 2024
Read aloud: January–February 2025

Poco and his troupe come to the town of Witheraway, where Poco is enchanted—supposedly by accident—by the town's "witherd" (he's not a wizard because there's only one legal wizard in Oz), and the troupe leaves without him while he's in the form of a cuckoo clock. The witherd make him into his lead servant, but as time goes on, Poco become suspicious that there's something more afoot.

With its emphasis on its protagonist's interiority, personal fears, and character growth, this reminded me a lot of McGraw's first Oz book, Merry Go Round, and though I didn't enjoy it as much, as I did enjoy it quite a lot. McGraw is more attentive to this kind of thing than any other Oz writer, and though I can see how some readers may want more cool locations and weird creatures, I enjoyed the change of pace. It feels Ozzy enough while feeling different from all the other books too. (I've seen it suggested that Rundelstone is most like Ozma of Oz, but that really has just one confined section.) Poco is on a quest of sorts, but not a physical journey, a quest to find out what happened to his troupe and a quest to discover his own confidence. The book moves a little slowly, perhaps—an adult reader will certainly be ahead of Poco—but I found it was perfectly paced for a six-year-old listener, who will be a bit less savvy to when characters are lying and what the truth might be.

You can't go wrong with Eric Shanower illustrations; he of course brings a lot of key moments to life. My kid pronounced they enjoyed the "whole thing." They do tend to get confused when there's a lot of "off-screen" backstory, which there is a bit here, with the origin of the Spellstones in Fyordi-Zik. We're told this in a lump of exposition, and I had to remind them of it a few times later on. I only found myself dissatisfied by the very ending. Though Ozma doesn't turn up to sort everything out too early (as she does in some Oz books), meaning Poco is ultimately responsible for solving most of the situation, I did find myself wishing she'd turned up a tiny bit later so he could do a tiny bit more on his own and prove himself.

But much like with Merry Go Round, I found myself wishing there was a sequel. I want to know what other scrapes Poco and the Troupadours get into with their itinerant lifestyle—and how they get back out again!

Next up in sequence: The Emerald Wand of Oz

Reading Toto of Oz Aloud to My Kid

Gina Wickwar's second Oz book following The Hidden Prince of Oz is also the last one published by the International Wizard of Oz Club. It came out over eighteen years ago, the longest gap the Oz Club has ever had between continuation novels (the previous record was seven years between Ozmapolitan and Wicked Witch and between Wicked Witch and Hidden Prince). I'm guessing this means no more continuation novels for the foreseeable future; my understanding is the Oz Club printed way more copies than there was demand for the books, and now the physical supply is something of an albatross. (According to some articles I read about Wickwar, she was working on a third Oz book, a sequel to Queen Zixi of Ix called Queen Zixi in Oz, but there's no sign of it many years later.)

Toto of Oz by Gina Wickwar
illustrated by Anna-Maria Cool

Published: 2006
Acquired: June 2024
Read aloud: December 2024–January 2025

For Hidden Prince and Toto, at least, there is a faint whiff of "why bother?" about it all. I don't mean that in a mean way, but previous Oz Club publications had been further installments by Royal Historians (Ruth Plumly Thompson, Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren Lynn McGraw, Rachel Cosgrove Payes), or those associated with them (Dick Martin), giving them something of an official imprimatur. Hidden Prince and Toto, though, are indistinguishable from so many of the other latter-day canon-consistent Oz publications from the likes of Emerald City Press or Hungry Tiger Press or the Royal Publisher of Oz.

In this one, Toto loses his growl again (the previous occasion being a somewhat underexplained subplot in Lost Princess) and sets out on a quest to find it again, alone, being too proud to tell everyone else what's wrong. Meanwhile, in the Scotlandesque country of Kiltoon, King Firth the Fourth's bride-to-be vanishes on their wedding day, causing the royal poet to venture forth on a quest... though not to find princess, but to kidnap Toto and bring back to Kiltoon to cheer up the king, who loves dogs. Meanwhile meanwhile, an orphan boy named Davy is whisked away from Louisville, Kentucky on the day of the Derby along with a horse named Lollipop; when they arrive in Oz, they find out that some enchantment prevents Lollipop from speaking, unlike most animals in Oz, the solution to which can be found in Kiltoon.

Like Hidden Prince, it has a Ruth Plumly Thompson vibe, and like Hidden Prince, I found it a bit weak... though I did enjoy it more than Hidden Prince. Hidden Prince was overstuffed with returning and original characters, and though there are probably still a bit too many here, it's not as overwhelming as in Hidden Prince. Sonny probably doesn't need McTavish the hoot owl with him, though, a character we are often told is grumpy but rarely seems to do anything actually grumpy; Davy and Lollipop don't need to be joined by a pair of living condiments, but thankfully, Wickwar seems to realize that herself, because she packs them off pretty quickly (similar to moves made in other overcrowded Oz books, like Hidden Valley). To that subplot's benefit, Toto has just one other character, Gladstone the guinea pig (he's a pig who makes gold guineas, a joke totally lost on the children of 2025, or indeed I suspect, 2006).

Still, I think all three subplots would have benefited from more characterful moments, the kind of thing the McGraws were so good at in Merry Go Round. Davy and Lollipop would have benefited from stronger interaction; their emotional bond should have been a key part of the book, a thing Thompson was great at with her human/animal pairs, like Pompa and Kabumpo, Ojo and Snuffer, Speedy and Terrybubble, Tompy and Yankee, or even David and Humpty. It's trickier to do if the animal can't speak, but Baum managed to give Hank more of a personality in Tik-Tok of Oz before he could talk than Lollipop gets here. Similarly, I think Gladstone could have been put to better use; surely Toto's character arc ought to have been him overcoming his pride and learning to accept help, but it's strangely muted if that's what Wickwar was going for.

Still, though, I found this fun to read aloud. The Scottish kingdom of Kiltoon (like many of Thompson's vaguely European pocket kingdoms, in the Gilliken country) lends itself to a lot of enjoyable accents, though my Scottish is a bit hit-or-miss! Queen Finna (who turns out to be a sea fairy from Baum's The Sea Fairies) is a great villain, one my kid loved to hate, even if I found the parameters of her exile to Oz somewhat underexplained. There are also, somewhat unusually for an Oz book, a few scenes of physical peril that kept my kid on edge, such as attacks by various guards. And though few post-Thompson authors have been as good as her or Baum for coming up with interesting weird places to visit, Wickwar's rate is above average, with the Dog Pound and the Isle of Sandwich.

Like a lot of Thompson novels, though, the ending is a bit of a letdown, with Ozma and Dorothy using the Magic Belt to just appear in Kiltoon and sort everything out, though Wickwar does manage to give most of the main characters a nice moment of heroism or two. And unlike in Lost Princess, we actually do get an explanation of what happened to Toto's growl! And indeed, my kid was hooked to this idea of re-losing the growl.

So overall fairly enjoyable; I would read a third Oz book from Wickwar if it continues to upward trend, though at this point it feels somewhat unlikely.

Next up in sequence: The Rundelstone of Oz

Reading The Hidden Prince of Oz Aloud to My Kid

My six-year-old and I are rapidly running out of "quasi-canonical" Oz books. Unlike previous books published by the International Wizard of Oz Club, The Hidden Prince of Oz has no connection to any Royal Historian; rather, the Oz Club ran a competition to find a book manuscript to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The Hidden Prince of Oz by Gina Wickwar
illustrated by Anna-Maria Cool

Published: 2000
Acquired: May 2024
Read aloud: October–December 2024

This is probably the reason for a (pretty minor) bit of backstory about the Wicked Witch of the East and the Tin Woodman; the novel takes place one hundred and one years exactly after she passed away. Aside from that, though, Hidden Prince reads much more like a Ruth Plumly Thompson pastiche than a Baum one: we have a small kingdom with comedy advisors, an orphan propelled to Oz in somewhat contrived circumstances, a nonhuman character who turns out to be another character under an enchantment, and a climax that features a wedding (various examples of these tropes: Kabumpo, Grampa, Giant Horse, Yellow Knight). As a Thompson fan, I don't mind this... but I found this book to be a drag. 

The fundamentals are good. In one subplot, the illegal magician Zeebo disappears, and his two faithful pets, the parrot Beak and the teacup poodle Penny (complete with magical teacup, of course) must set out to rescue him; in the other, the American orphan Emma-Lou winds up in the Oz kingdom of Silica along with a living wooden Indian from the porch of an Arizona trading post. Two small animals against the fearful world seems like fertile ground for an Oz plot; I really like Oz books where seeming underdogs go on dangerous quests and prove themselves (e.g., Wonderful Wizard, Patchwork Girl, Kabumpo, Merry Go Round). But Penny and Beak quickly get lost in a slew of characters that join their quest; Ketzal the feathered boa is a fun idea, but there's also a completely pointless bit about a leperchaun. In the other plotline, you barely get to know Emma-Lou and Chief Thundercloud because they're joined by Bungle the Glass Cat, Princess Vitria of Silica, and her cousin Vitrix. More and more characters are piled on, until by the end of the novel we also have the Tin Woodman, the Wizard (though he leaves before the climax), Smithereens the third assistant glassworks keeper, Venté the passenger pigeon, Polychrome the Rainbow's Daughter, and the Saw-Horse. And I think I am probably forgetting someone else! Any one of the added characters are fine on their own, there's just not enough space for them here. Wickwar should have saved them for another book!

None of the characters gets the space to do anything interesting or clever or memorable, and it seems like in many cases they just get a line of dialogue or bit of action per chapter so you don't forget about them... but that often seems outside their scope or personalities. (Penny and Venté, for example, carry bags of gold, which seems unlike for two characters with no hands!) The cores of the book (in my opinion) ought to have been 1) Penny and Beak's devotion to their master, who frankly doesn't deserve it, and 2) Emma-Lou's finding of a place in the world, probably with Thundercloud. The two animals should have stayed on their own; Emma-Lou and Thundercloud should have gone on their quest with just Bungle at most. But these things are buried under a piling-on on incident and characters, and Emma-Lou weirdly ends up adopted by Zeebo, a character 1) she only just met, and 2) who has displayed nothing but dubious moral character the entire novel! She should have become a princess with Cyan and Vitrea! And why does Vitrea have to give up her kingdom for a man, anyway?

Anna-Maria Cool illustrates, and proves herself a solid mid-tier Oz artist. She's no John R. Neill or Eric Shanower... but then, who is? She's good at bringing characters to life in particular; her faces have a real liveliness to them that really helps with the book's storytelling.

On top of all this, I don't think the book is longer by word count than a typical Oz book, but it's got thirty chapters instead of the usual twenty-something; this means that if you read a chapter aloud on alternate nights (as I do), the book does seem to drag on, taking over a month to get through. (Reading it back to back with Ozmapolitan revealed that I use the same voice for Eurkea and Bungle, a sort of "southern belle" accent. I guess it just seems right for cats.)

All that said, though, when I asked my six-year-old if they liked it, they said yes, and when I asked what, they said, "All of it." I think they particularly liked the unusual characters like Penny and Ketzal, so it's a shame they didn't have more to do.

Next up in sequence: Toto of Oz

Reading The Ozmapolitan of Oz Aloud to My Kid

After illustrating several Oz books by others—two by the McGraws and two by Ruth Plumly Thompson—Oz superfan Dick Martin illustrated his own Oz book for the International Wizard of Oz Club, The Ozmapolitan of Oz. The book takes its title from a "newspaper" sometimes produced by Reilly & Lee to promote the Oz books; here, for the first time, it is established within an actual Oz book, depicted as being founded by the Wizard back when he was the ruler of the Emerald City. The protagonist is Septimius "Tim" Septentrion, a copyboy for the paper who thinks it could be something great instead of the lazy operation it is. With Dorothy, Eureka the Pink Kitten, and a Mifkit named Jinx (possible the Mifket from Scalawagons), he sets out on an expedition to promote the newspaper and obtain interesting stories.

The Ozmapolitan of Oz by Dick Martin

Originally published: 1986
Acquired: December 2023
Read aloud: September–October 2024

The newspaper angle ends up being incredibly unimportant in the end; Tim and company don't travel around doing journalism or anything like that, it's just the usual Oz hijinks of bumping into random people and places and moving on. Indeed, the book is definitely on the low end for incident, because usually the protagonists just meet someone, talk to them, and go somewhere else, and their overarching goal is honestly pretty hard to care about. They have no particular destination, they have no particular problem they are trying to solve. Nor do they really solve any particular problems, and most of the places they go are not really very interesting. It's like a weak Thompson novel but without Thompson's manic energy or commitment to excruciating puns. You're just left with... not much of anything, to be honest.

Martin tries to add in some kind of suspense, I guess, with a mysterious crow following the adventuring party about, and a mystery involving Tim. The details are so slight, however, there's little to glom onto; I think my six-year-old didn't even remember there had been a crow in the book before when it showed up for the second time. It turns out Tim is a prince trying to prove himself—the fun twist here is that he is trying to prove he can accomplish things because in his country royalty are not supposed to accomplish things. It's sort of an inversion of Thompson's Purple Prince of Oz. But unfortunately we don't even know he's trying to prove himself until we're told what the twist is, so it all falls flat, and my six-year-old didn't really follow it at all. I think it could have added some suspense, but not if it's all dumped on you in the second-last chapter.

On top of all this, Tim is a pretty dull protagonist, Dick Martin is one of those writers who doesn't remember how plucky Baum actually made Dorothy, and you could take Jinx the Mifket out of the book without affecting a thing. Only Eureka shows an ounce of characterization or energy. If you read Oz books for the interactions between interesting characters (and I do), there's none of it here. Sometimes Jinx and Eureka snipe a bit but that's about it.

Plus, weirdly, it seems like Dick Martin is as uninterested in providing visuals of his own ideas as he was those of the McGraws and Thompson. The pictures are scanty and often dull.

Anyway, I guess it has a few moments of charm (I like the bit where Eureka tricks a dinosaur with grammatical terms) but overall I found this had little going for it, and it seemed to leave little impression on my kid.

Next up in sequence: The Hidden Prince of Oz

Reading The Forbidden Fountain of Oz Aloud to My Kid

Yankee in Oz and Enchanted Island created a precedent—like them, Forbidden Fountain is a return to Oz published by the International Wizard of Oz Club written by a "Royal Historian," in this case, the mother-and-daughter team of Eloise and Lauren McGraw, authors of the final "Famous Forty" novel, Merry Go Round in Oz. And like them, it has somewhat mediocre illustrations provided by Dick Martin.

The Forbidden Fountain of Oz by Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren Lynn McGraw
illustrated by Dick Martin

Originally published: 1980
Acquired: July 2024
Read aloud: September 2024

I was looking forward to this a lot, because I knew it had a cracker of a premise. Ozma accidentally drinks the Water of Oblivion from the Forbidden Fountain, forgetting who she is; as "Poppy," disguised as a boy, she ends up wandering the countryside of Oz. While the denizens of the Royal Palace search for her, it's Kabumpo, the Elegant Elephant of Oz, who stumbles upon her—only in classic Kabumpo fashion, he gets the situation entirely wrong. Plus, it was by the writers of my favorite post-Baum novel in the Famous Forty.

Perhaps because my expectations were so high, I found it mildly disappointing... though I should say it's probably also my favorite of the "quasi-canonical" Oz novels I've read so far, except for maybe Wicked Witch. The first couple chapters are great, with a really compelling set-up. In fact, they were so intense that after the first chapter, my six-year-old was so freaked out by Ozma's loss of memory, that they declared they didn't want to read any more of the book! It took me a bit to persuade them that surely everything would be all right in the end (as it always is, in an Oz book) and thus that we ought to press on and keep going.

I also really liked the role of Kabumpo. If there's a complaint to be lodged with the post-Thompson Oz novels, it's that the sense of continuity abates somewhat; Neill picks up some of Thompson's characters and concepts (in his own distinctive way, at least) but then in the later Famous Forty books, Jack Snow and Rachel Cosgrove ignore everything post-Baum, as did the McGraws their first time out. But here, Thompson's Kabumpo is a main player—and I think they do very well by him. Like in Kabumpo in Oz and Lost King, Kabumpo here has good intentions... but his self-assurance and vanity causes him to get a key detail very wrong. It's a good showing for a character who hasn't had a key role for some time.

The McGraws give us some striking images, particularly the creepy maze in the Emerald City that was used to exile people in the time of King Pastoria, and some fun new characters, particularly Toby the highwayman who doesn't have the nerve to actually rob someone. There's also a fun area called the "Bordermoor," which is between the Gillikin and Winkie countries,* and thus things there are both purple and yellow. Other worldbuilding note: The book tells us there are Roma people in Oz (not that it uses that term), contradicting Ojo in Oz, which ended with Ozma sending them all back to Europe.

Where the book falls down for me is that if Merry Go Round was like a strong Thompson, this is like a weak one, in that the protagonists move between largely uninteresting locations and don't really do anything interesting to get out of them. Merry Go Round had a lot of team problem-solving, one of my favorite things in an Oz book, but this is one of those Oz books where the characters more stumble in and out of places without much deliberate action on their own part. The result is kind of unmemorable, like reading Purple Prince. I would particularly liked to have seen Ozma shown some steel or ingenuity as "Poppy," but she is pretty timid and directionless. C'mon, Tip was awesome!

That said, unlike many Thompsons, it does have a strong ending. When Ozma makes it back to the Emerald City, the first person she sees is Jack Pumpkinhead, who calls her "Tip." My kid was like, "It's because she's a boy!" No no, I pooh-poohed, Jack is just seeing some kind of essence of Ozma. But they were right and I was wrong! In boy's clothes, Ozma looks like Tip, and there's a touching scene where Jack and Mombi are all Ozma can remember. My kid was bouncing off the wall in excitement as everything came together in the last two chapters. 

When I asked if they liked it, they gave me the thumbs-up sign five times. "Each thumbs up means one star," they explained. So I guess they were into it! When I asked it that was despite how scary the beginning had been, they insisted the beginning hadn't been scary at all.

Next up in sequence: The Ozmapolitan of Oz

* For some reason this is a trope of many of my recent Oz books; Hidden Valley, Yankee, Enchanted Island, and Forbidden Fountain all go back and forth between these two countries. Where are my Munchkins at?

Reading The Enchanted Island of Oz Aloud to My Kid

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up in sequence: The Forbidden Fountain of Oz

Reading Yankee in Oz Aloud to My Kid

Yankee in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson
illustrated by Dick Martin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up in sequence: The Enchanted Island of Oz

Reading The Wicked Witch of Oz Aloud to My Kid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other Thoughts:

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

Next up in sequence: Merry Go Round in Oz

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

Reading The Runaway in Oz Aloud to My Son

The Runaway in Oz by John R. Neill
edited and illustrated by Eric Shanower

There are a number of Oz books that some fans call "quasi-canonical"; that is to say, they have some sort of claim to official status, but they are not part of the "Famous Forty" (the novels from the original publisher(s) of the series). For many, it's that they were written by a Famous Forty author, but released by a different publisher. It has been my intention to incorporate those stories in me and my son's marathon through the Oz books—but where they ought to have been published, not where they were.

Originally published: 1995
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: January–February 2024

The Runaway in Oz was intended as the Oz book for 1943, but John R. Neill died before he finished editing the manuscript or even started doing the illustrations; the publisher opted to forego an Oz book for the year, and the next would not appear until 1946. In 1995, however, Books of Wonder finally published the book with the blessing of Neill's family, edited and illustrated by contemporary Oz superstar Eric Shanower. I opted to read this to my son following on from Lucky Bucky as if it was the Oz book for 1943. By the time we got to 1995, I am not so sure he would remember who, say, Jenny Jump was!

In some ways, this is probably the best of John R. Neill's four Oz books. In a comment on the late, lamented Tor.com, editor Eric Shanower says one of the things he did was "[t]ake out whatever made no sense"—in a John R. Neill book this could, of course, be quite a lot, and Runaway certainly has a cohesion lacking in, say, Wonder City or Scalawagons of Oz. It has two clear, parallel plots in the classic Baum/Thompson fashion, one about Scraps running away from the Emerald City and one about Jenny Jump, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the Wogglebug trying to find her. Yet it still has that John R. Neill fancifulness, with details such as the Wogglebug literally creating a castle in the air while he dreams—one he intends to use to take a vacation!

The best part of the book is probably the beginning, where Scraps antagonizes in turn Jellia Jamb, the Tin Woodman, and Jenny Jump. Convinced everyone is "mean" for simply telling her to behave herself, she resolves to run away. It's a very child-like, very accurate response, and it led to some good moments with my five-year-old, who likes to declare that I am mean whenever I enforce a rule or boundary, no matter how gently I do it. Were Jellia or Jenny being mean to Scraps, I asked? No, he declared. Hmmmm... Will this lesson sink in? Well, I am less sure about that.

You might think, then, that the book would end with Scraps learning to accept some responsibility for her actions, but this only kind of happens. There is a great scene where Scraps returns to the Emerald City, seemingly in prisoners' garb (a sheet, in a callback to Patchwork Girl), but I feel like an author who was not John R. Neill could have pulled things together a bit more strongly. I do like the somewhat Ozzy moral that sometimes it's right to run away, but it does seem to me that Scraps largely gets away without actually learning anything even if she does inadvertently face some consequences.

So the book was lively and focused, but not always totally successful at what it seemed like it was doing, if that makes sense. And while it certainly had a coherence lacking in Wonder City, Wonder City was so manic it almost gets away with its many faults, which isn't quite the case here.

Eric Shanower illustrates, and it's certainly a beautiful edition. Shanower's character designs are clearly influenced by Neill's, but he has a somewhat different style, with a tightness of line that makes the weirdness of what he's drawing seem more real. This being a Neill novel, there's a lot of fanciful imagery, and Shanower does a great job with it; probably my favorite was the army of quinces! The flat people were also pretty great. 

I could also detect (so I believe) a bit of fannishness in Shanower's editing. This is the first book to get east and west right since Ruth Plumly Thompson took over, and there's an extended passage of exposition reversing Jenny Jump's "lobotomy" from Wonder City. Actually, I very much enjoyed Shanower's Jenny, particularly all her costume and hairstyle changes. It's a shame Neill's work is still under copyright, because that means Jenny (and Number Nine) haven't been available to other authors, and they're strong characters I'd like to see in other Oz stories. I also like the continuing friendship between Scraps and Jack Pumpkinhead.

Things my son really did not like: the stressful sequence where the air castle disintegrates, Scraps being turned all black by the quinces. But on the whole, he reported enjoying this one. Both of us like the Patchwork Girl a lot, so perhaps we were destined to! Even the three-year-old is into her; whenever we read a chapter at bedtime, he would point to the cover and declare, "Scraps is rainbow. Scraps is rainbow!" A couple weeks later, I asked him if he remembered what color Scraps was and he said "Scraps is rainbow... but she turned black!" So the books are starting to sink in for him as well.

Next up in sequence: The Magical Mimics in Oz

Reading Little Wizard Stories of Oz Aloud to My Son

 Little Wizard Stories of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

I was, of course, not just content to read my son the original fourteen Oz novels by Baum. Why not the whole Famous Forty? Heck, why not all the "quasi-canonical" stories too?? Why not all the "Borderlands" novels???

Contents originally published: 1913
Acquired: July 2013
Previously read: December 2016
Read aloud: December 2021

My ambitions began with Little Wizard Stories of Oz, which collects six Oz short stories that came out as individual booklets in 1913 in, if I recall correctly, the run-up to the publication of The Patchwork Girl of Oz, which resumed the series after Baum's attempt at ending it, but had just turned out to be a two-year hiatus. Each pairs off two Oz characters: the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger, Dorothy and Toto, Tik-Tok and the Nome King, Ozma and the Wizard, Jack Pumpkinhead and the Saw-Horse, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman. I actually didn't know about this until I was an adult, and only read it for the first time a few years ago.

With six short stories, it reads aloud very quickly, especially when my son insisted on two chapters back-to-back; we got through it in just a couple days. I don't think it will ever be anyone's favorite Oz book. but I particularly enjoyed reading the Lion/Tiger story: the Hungry Tiger decides that he finally will eat a baby, but then ends up helping the baby find its mother. My son didn't like the idea that the Tiger would eat a baby, though. He also didn't like Tik-Tok getting broken, but I do really enjoy my supercilious voice for Kaliko, the Nome King's steward.

There are some good hijinks in the Jack Pumpkinhead one, too, and the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman one as well. I am not sure my son got a ton out of it, though... but then there's not a ton to get! Nice John R. Neill pictures in this one.

Return to Oz: Little Wizard Stories of Oz by L. Frank Baum

My review of the second-most-recent Survivors tale is up at Unreality SF. Series six represents a new approach for the range, and one which is most welcome.

Trade paperback, 144 pages
Published 2011 (contents: 1913)
Acquired July 2013
Reread December 2016

Little Wizard Stories of Oz by L. Frank Baum
illustrated by John R. Neill

This quasi-canonical (i.e., not part of the "Famous Forty" but still by one of the official "Royal Historians") Oz book is necessary for completists, but unlikely to be anyone's favorite. Baum provides six short stories, each about a different pair of Oz characters: the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger, Dorothy and Toto, Tik-Tok and the Nome King, Ozma and the Wizard, Jack Pumpkinhead and the Sawhorse, and the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman. Some read like interludes from an Oz novel, the sort of random encounter a character might have on the way from point a to point b that has nothing to do with the overall plot. Some are pretty unimpressive (Ozma seems particularly foolish in her tale, and the Dorothy story has an unconvincing moral), but some are good fun. I like the Lion and the Tiger one, as the Tiger tries to go through with his long-held desire to eat a baby but can't manage it, and the interplay between the implacable Tik-Tok and the easily roused Nome King is delightful. (The Nome steward Kaliko once again shows himself to be the only sensible and competent person in the whole Nome Kingdom.)

In Two Weeks: A short break from Oz, to cover 2017's Doctor Who Christmas read, Twelve Doctors of Christmas!