Reading The Scarecrow of Oz Aloud to My Son... Plus We Make Oz Creatures out of Duplo!

The Scarecrow of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

This novel unites Baum's Trot and Cap'n Bill books with his Oz ones by bringing those two characters (along with Button-Bright) to live in Oz. The writers of the late, lamented Oz blog Burzee were skeptical of what Baum claims in his foreword, that his readers wanted him to bring Trot and Cap'n Bill to Oz, but going on the sample of my three-year-old son, it's entirely believable; he'd been campaigning for it since we read The Sea Fairies, and continued to campaign for it throughout this book. "When are they going to get to Oz???" he'd plaintively ask about once a chapter.

Originally published: 1915
Acquired and read aloud: March 2022

This is the one of Baum's original fourteen Oz novels that I remembered the least about going into it. Beyond the fact that Trot and Cap'n Bill and Button-Bright made it to Oz in the end, I could have told you literally nothing about it. While I remember many of the early novels in exhaustive detail, everything from this point on is a bit murkier, yet for each novel I could give you some capsule plot... except this one. All of the places they visited were totally new to me; the adventure the characters had with the Scarecrow in Jinxland upon finally getting to Oz did not strike a single chord of memory.

It's a bit surprising because though I don't think it would ever be a favorite, it has some fun bits. The subterranean explorations that open the novel are well done, the visit to Pessim's island is entertaining, Cap'n Bill comes across better than ever. Back in Sea Fairies, he was very skeptical about magic; now he comes across as very practical about it. It's him who comes up with many of the characters' best plans, applying down-to-earth problem-solving skills to extraordinary situations. My son was particularly taken with the trip to Mo (Baum once again crossing over with one of his other fantasies, in this case The Magical Monarch of Mo) where it rains lemonade and snows popcorn, and while taking a car ride during this book we spent some time imagining what all the other kinds of Mo weather could embody. I don't remember having much of an opinion of Button-Bright as a child, but I find him highly entertaining now, and I think Scarecrow is the best depiction in the series of his almost supernatural ability to get lost. (It does seem a shame after how big a deal was made over his Magic Umbrella in Sky Island, that he just loses it between books here!)

One thing I appreciated is that I felt like it had more illustrations than Tik-Tok of Oz, where they had seemed somewhat sparse, with many pages passing with no visuals. Scarecrow of Oz constantly had something of visual interest to look at.

On the other hand, for a book called The Scarecrow of Oz, it really does not show off the Scarecrow at his best. Do his brains solve the crisis in Jinxland? No, not at all. It's just luck! A bit disappointing; Baum often seemed to forget in the later books to actually show the Scarecrow being smart!

My son seemed to like it on the whole. During the sequence where the Scarecrow was threatened with burning, though, he hid under his covers. It's interesting; sequences of physical danger didn't seem to affect him much in the earlier books, but as we go on and his understanding of the stories is growing, they can scare him more and more. On the other hand, what is disturbing to an adult is something he just doesn't get. In this one, we learn that since people in Oz live forever, if you dispose of an old king by throwing him into a lake and dropping stones on him, he's just down there forever!

My son was taken by the Ork, the bird with a propeller for a tail:

We built one together out of Duplo:

During the time period we were reading this, at one point we were playing and my son turned to me and said, "Dad, why do we live in Florida?" "What do you mean?" I asked cautiously, not really wanting to explain the academic job market. "Why don't we live in Oz?"

Good question.

Reading L. Frank Baum's Sky Island Aloud to My Son

 Sky Island: Being the Further Exciting Adventures of Trot and Cap'n Bill after Their Visit to the Sea Fairies
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

After we finished The Sea Fairies, my son was keen that Trot and Cap'n Bill should get to Oz. I did tell him that would happen someday, but also that we would first read Sky Island, where that did not happen... but what would happen is that they would meet a couple familiar characters, specifically Button-Bright and Polychrome, both of whom originated in The Road to Oz. He remembers Button-Bright if I go "don't know," his refrain in that novel (he's aged up a bit here), and we had actually just re-encountered Polychrome in Tik-Tok of Oz (which is out of publication order but I think worked well here).

Originally published: 1912
Acquired: February 2017
Previously read: March 2017
Read aloud: January–March 2022

This is one of my favorite of Baum's fantasies, and it held up for me on a reread. It has a good role for Cap'n Bill, Button-Bright shows some real ingenuity, and Trot gets a great starring role in the last few chapters especially. It basically fixes everything I didn't like about The Sea Fairies. On the other hand, I'm not sure it maintained my three-year-old son's interest; it has a more complex plot than most of your Baum journey novels, and I don't think he was terrible interested in, say, whether Ghip-Ghisizzle should rule the Blue Country. We had a bit of a slowdown in the middle of the book; we started it right at the end of January, but there was a period where he very rarely wanted to read it, and so we didn't wrap up until early March.

That said, he did ask some good questions (I drew him a map to explain how the fog bank dividing Sky Island worked when we wanted to know why they didn't just go around it), and he always got a kick out of the doggerel of the talking blue parrot that barks like a dog; he also had a big reaction to when the elephant-shaped handle of Button-Bright's magic umbrella transforms into a real elephant.

The villain of Sky Island, the Boolooroo, punishes people by "patching" them: he cuts two people in half (no Blueskin can die until they are exactly six hundred years old and pass through the Arch of Phinis) and then stitches half of one to half of the other, creating two hybrids. This kind of thing is horrifying if you think about it as an adult, but just vaguely amusing to a toddler. Anyway, one day at dinner a week or so after we finished the book, he suggested that he could combine two different candies by "patching" them into one! Not a connection I expected him to make, but I was charmed.

Sky Island is rife was interesting worldbuilding, and tantalizing hints about things that are never explained, such as the Arch of Phinis, or the fog bank. I'm a bit surprised that none of the modern-day writers of Oz fan stuff, who have picked over so much of the minutiae of the original Baum novels and explained and expanded it, have (as far as I know) gone back to Sky Island and found out how it is fairing. Trot is technically, after all, still its queen! Seems like an obvious sequel hook. (EDIT: Apparently there is a short story in the 1983 issue of Oziana where Trot uses the Magic Belt to go back.)

(Incidentally, Trot must have read at least some of the Oz books because she knows about the country, but apparently Road to Oz was not one of them because she doesn't know who Button-Bright is.)

Reading L. Frank Baum's The Sea Fairies Aloud to My Son

 The Sea Fairies by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

After he ended the Oz books (unsuccessfully) with The Emerald City of Oz, Baum tried to begin a new series of children's fantasies, about Trot and Cap'n Bill, a young girl and a retired sailor who go on adventures. These only lasted two books before Baum gave up, gave in, and gave his public what they wanted by returning to Oz in Patchwork Girl. Later, though, he would bring Trot and Cap'n Bill to Oz in The Scarecrow of Oz, making Trot an Oz princess like Dorothy and Betsy Bobbin.

Originally published: 1911
Acquired and previously read: February 2017
Read aloud: January 2022

What confused me as a child was that the author's note at the beginning of Scarecrow indicated Trot and Cap'n Bill were being brought to Oz by popular demand... but how did any of Baum's readers know who these characters were if they hadn't yet appeared in a book? It wasn't until much later that I learned about The Sea Fairies and Sky Island (I think maybe when I was in high school), and even later than that when I finally got around to reading them (I was in graduate school).

So I wondered if I could construct my son's Oz journey in a way that would avoid my youthful confusion, and create the kind of demand for Trot and Cap'n Bill going to Oz that Baum's contemporary readers experienced. In strict publication order, these would be read between Emerald City and Patchwork Girl, but I wasn't about to delay getting to my favorite Oz book, so I decided to work them in slightly later: after finishing Patchwork Girl, I gave him the choice of Tik-Tok of Oz or The Sea Fairies, and he picked The Sea Fairies, even with my explanation that it was not an Oz book per se, but one that took place near Oz. (The fact that we had already read The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus gave some precedent for this.)

Unfortunately, I think this book is not up to much. It's one of those Baum books where no one has a goal; Trot and Cap'n Bill are sort of kidnapped by mermaids and made into mermaids, then they spend a hundred pages just being taken on a tour of what's underwater. Halfway through, a plot finally turns up, but it's one in which they play very little role, as most of their problems are solved by other characters. That said, I do like Cap'n Bill (a gruff sailor voice is exactly the kind I like to make), and this time I had an appreciation of Baum's worldbuilding. He wasn't always great at coherent extrapolation, but the explanation he offers for how mermaids work is one he explores all the implications of. Mermaids are surrounded by thin pockets of air which let them breathe, and keep their clothes from getting wet; this also lets them do things like cook. Trot and Cap'n Bill meet other humans underwater, who were kidnapped by an evil sea creature and given gills, and these ones have to wear wet clothes all the time and don't get to eat good food.

I don't know how much my son liked this one, but he seems to like Trot and Cap'n Bill themselves because he was game for returning to them with Sky Island.

Return to Oz: Sky Island by L. Frank Baum

Captain Jack is back! My review of Big Finish's new box set about missing adventures in the life of Jack Harkness is up at USF.

Trade paperback, 288 pages
Published 2002 (originally 1912)
Acquired February 2017
Read March 2017

Sky Island: Being the Further Exciting Adventures of Trot and Cap'n Bill after Their Visit to the Sea Fairies
by L. Frank Baum
illustrated by John R. Neill

Like The Sea Fairies, I hadn’t read this until prompted to do so by the folks at the Oz blog Burzee; unlike The Sea Fairies, I really enjoyed the experience. It feels more planned than a lot of Baum’s novels; so many of his books are about getting from Point A to Point B, and even when they’re technically not about trying to get somewhere they sort of work that in there anyway, like the excursion to the outside world in Marvelous Land or the tour of Oz in Emerald City or the various searches in Lost Princess. (Some of these do it better than others; I enjoy Marvelous Land, whereas in Emerald City the travel stuff is just a diversion from the invasion plot.) But Sky Island is very much about the governments and people of Sky Island in a way that makes it more focused than almost any other of Baum’s fantasies I can recollect. It’s also tremendous fun—Baum is inventive and clever and whimsical and suspenseful in just the right proportions, and what Trot has to do here actually matters, both to her group and to the people of the island.

I agree with Nick and Sarah at Burzee that Baum’s doing something political here, but I too don't know what, and I actually like that it’s hard to map on something specific; Baum’s attempts at social commentary can be heavy-handed at times, but this one is engaging. I really liked the stuff about democracy and poverty and such, and it was thought-provoking even if I didn’t quite know what he was trying to say.

I enjoyed Cap’n Bill in this one a lot, even if he was somewhat ineffectual; the way he takes charge of the military is fun even if he does end up captured ASAP. Baum always seems to have it out for militaries! (This reminded me a lot of some of the stuff in Ozma of Oz.)

The Dover edition of this book does have the color plates, for which I’m very grateful—this feels like some of Neill’s best work to me! But maybe I just think that because I actually don’t have very many Oz books that include color illustrations, so of course this one stands out. The cloud journey on the umbrella looks great, and I always like the way Neill draws Polychrome.

Next Week: Back to Oz, as we meet Scraps, The Patchwork Girl of Oz!

Return to Oz: The Sea Fairies by L. Frank Baum

Two more Unreality reviews in the past couple days: the eighth Doctor begins fighting the Time War, and the tenth Doctor and Rose make their glorious comeback.

Trade paperback, 240 pages
Published 1998 (originally 1911)
Acquired and read February 2017

The Sea Fairies by L. Frank Baum
illustrated by John R. Neill

I’ve been reading a blog called Burzee of late, which is about a pair of Oz fans working their way through the canonical Oz works, plus related stories. Thus far, every novel they’ve done has been one I’ve read before, but when they hit the two Trot and Cap’n Bill books that L. Frank Baum wrote during the Great Hiatus between Emerald City and Patchwork Girl, I decided to read along with them, as I’d never read them before. So the commentary that follows is mostly a response to Sarah and Nick’s commentary at Burzee.

I’m not even sure I knew The Sea Fairies existed when I was a kid; while I owned some of the other Baum fantasies that tied into Oz, like Queen Zixi of Ix and Dot and Tot of Merryland, I kind of remember being perplexed as how Trot and Cap’n Bill knew Button Bright already in The Scarecrow of Oz, which would seem to indicate I wasn’t even aware of a book that would plug the gap.

I didn’t like this very much. It wasn’t terrible, but I did find it dead boring. I have a friend who really likes children’s fantasy but can’t get into the Oz novels because they’re so plotless—so many of them are about getting from point A to point B, with just a series of visits in between, like Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, The Road to Oz, and so on. This doesn’t bother me if the places are interesting and there’s some kind of urgency to the quest (I like Dorothy and the Wizard a lot, Road less so), but Sea Fairies is like one of those novels except no one is going from anywhere to anywhere! There’s no goal or purpose to anything that happens in the first half of the novel, it’s just a travelogue without the actual travel. Sarah and Nick connect it to The Twinkle Tales, a series of short fantasies for younger readers, but I found that pretty hit-or-miss, which I guess corresponds to my reaction to this book. Nick says the book eventually clicked for him… but it never did for me! (I guess there were some good bad puns, though.)

The arrival of a villain in the character of Zog halfway through wasn’t a “merciful release” for me as it was for Nick, though, because by the time the plot turned up, I was so disinterested that I didn’t care what evil he did. And the powers of the mermaids are so amazing and absolute that it’s hard to feel like anyone is ever actually in real danger.

I did like Trot and Can’n Bill more than Nick and Sarah did—they both have a nice practicality to them. Bill sort of veers between out of his depth (heh) to the only person on top of things, but I guess it depends on how closely he can connect his fairyland experiences to a real world one. (He does a pretty good job leading the troops in Sky Island, I feel.) Having an adult along is interesting, and something Baum didn’t do a whole lot: the Wizard in Dorothy and the Wizard and the Shaggy Man in Road, and Rinkitink in, well Rinkitink in Oz seem to be principle ones.

My Dover edition’s illustrations aren’t very high-quality reproductions, and it omits the color plates, sadly. I don’t think there’s a reprint that has them. As a result, the illustrations didn’t make much of an impact on me. I’m glad I read this at last, but I have to agree that it’s hard to imagine giving this to a kid now. I was starting to wonder if Baum was a terrible writer, and I only liked his other books because I was nostalgic for them! Thankfully Sky Island was much much better.

Sarah connects Sea Fairies to Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, and I did too, but in the context of the 1978 film, which maybe gives an indication of what a 1980s adaptation of The Sea Fairies (which was supposedly planned) would have been like. Having seen the film I can easily imagine an adaptation of Sea Fairies in the vein of The Water Babies, which features Jon Pertwee as a singing Scottish cartoon lobster. (Actually, there are some elements of The Water Babies film that are closer to Baum’s novel than Kingsley’s!)

Next Week: Trot and Cap’n Bill return, but this time go up instead of down, to Sky Island!