Jump to the Beat!

As has been mentioned here on several occasions, I've been listening to my music more consistently in the last couple years. The consequence of this is, of course, that so have my kids. While Kid One is largely agnostic toward music (they do occasionally enjoy a bit of They Might Be Giants), Kid Two, like me, is the kind of person who will get a song stuck in their head and begin singing it randomly later on.

A particular favorite of Kid Two's in this regard is Belle and Sebastian's "The Party Line." I know Belle and Sebastian has been around for a while, and plays the kind of music that is very much to my taste, but I only got into them within the past six months, and have listened to their album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (2015) a decent amount. Kid Two would randomly bust out with "jump to the beat of the party line!" and begin jumping around. It actually hit the point where I could be listening to a different Belle and Sebastian track and he would start going, "Put on 'Party Line'!" (I do not think Kid One has this capacity to recognize different artists' styles yet.)

This wasn't the only song Kid Two would bust out with at random; in particular, the other was Goldfish's "Show You How," where he would just start going "get up and shake it now!" To a lesser extent, he'd sometimes also do the "oooh waaah oooh waaah oooooh oooh waaah oooh waaah oooh" bit from Goldfish's "This Is How It Goes."

Additionally, at his daycare, he somehow picked up "We Will Rock You," though he thought it was "We will, we will, we will rock and roll you," and would often ask for "rock and roll"... and would accept literally no other song as "rock and roll" because it didn't say "rock and roll" in it! I don't have any Queen on my iPod, but I did persuade him to accept "We Built This City" as a substitute... though the version I own is from 2011's The Muppets!

This seemed like enough songs for a critical mass, so I ended up making Kid Two a Yoto card. A Yoto, if you don't know, is a kid-friendly, screen-free audio player. Both of our kids own Yoto Minis, which allow them to place various cards in them that stream audio content: music, audiobooks, podcasts, and such. You can purchase premade cards from Yoto (we have bought a number of audiobooks from them especially), but you can also build your own playlists and link them to "make-your-own cards"; for Kid One, I have made a card of Pokémon theme songs, for example, and both kids have copies of a card of songs from Colourblocks and Numberblocks.

Kid Two was into the card. This was back in January, I think, and as time has passed, I have added songs to it either when I notice him singing them a lot or when he specifically requests I do so. He listened to it a lot early on, less so recently, but I'm sure he'll rediscover it sooner or later. Here's the current track listing:

1. "The Party Line" by Belle and Sebastian, from Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (2015)
2. "Show You How" by Goldfish, from Get Busy Living (2010)
3. "This Is How It Goes" by Goldfish, from Perceptions of Pacha (2008)
4. "We Built This City" by the Muppets, from The Muppets (2011)
5. "Shake It Up" by Nortec Collective, from Tijuana Sound Machine (2008)
6. "Mouthwash" by Kate Nash, from Made Of Bricks (2007)
7. "Up the Mountain" by Regina Spektor, from Home, before and after (2022)
8. "Talk to Me" by Goldfish, from Late Night People (2017)
9. "If I Could Find" by Goldfish, from Late Night People (2017)
10. "What Might Have Been" by Regina Spektor, from Home, before and after (2022)
11. "They Might Be Giants" by They Might Be Giants, from Flood (1990)
12. "Watching You" by Rogue Traders, from Here Come the Drums (2005)

Forty-eight minutes of excellent taste! Clearly a fan of South African house music in particular. His interest can often turn on very small things, in all seriousness; "Mouthwash" is on there because he likes the bit where Kate Nash goes "and I'm singing 'uh oh' on a Friday night..."

I do have to double-check lyrics before loading them onto the card (thankfully the Kate Nash song is appropriate for example! on the other hand, "The Party Line" includes the lyric, "People like to drive their cars and smoke up / People like to sit inside and toke up").

I recently asked him which of the songs on the card was his favorite, and he told me it was "Up the Mountain" by Regina Spektor. That one is a hit with both kids!

EDITED ON 2 MAY 2026: Just added "Get Down" from They Might Be Giants's new album The World Is to Dig at his request!

If You Haven't Got a Penny, Then a Ha'penny Will Do

Visiting Grandma's yarn store in Grandma's sweater.

Our second kid had the misfortune to be born just a couple days before Christmas. This means his birthday almost always bumps up against our travel plans. I think across 2022-24, we were either driving on his birthday, or his birthday was the last Friday of school before winter break, the day before we drove.

But the way these things move around finally worked out to his advantage this year, as Son Two's fifth birthday came three days after the last day of school. So we could spend two days travelling and then celebrate his birthday on a day with no driving... and even be with my family when we did! This coincides with his increasing awareness of his own birthday; this is the first year, I think, where he's been anticipating its arrival for a sustained period of time.

(At first, he was opposed that he wouldn't get to celebrate with his friends on his actual birthday, but he came around eventually, though he keeps referring to the party we'll have now that we're back home as his "fake birthday party.") 

Indeed, it was nice to celebrate. We were at my parents for Christmas, so they were both there, plus my sister and my brother's ex-wife. Son Two got some good presents, and for once, I felt like the presents of the birthday were well-separated from the presents of Christmas... three whole days! And then, instead of just getting to pick what fast-food restaurant we stopped at on our drive, he got a proper meal, generously prepared by my mom. He picked one of his favorite foods, pizza with black olives. And my mom also make a rainbow cake, which totally delighted him.

Son Two is at an interesting age (aren't they all?) where he is incredibly creative and playful but also desirous of a high level of autonomy that he doesn't get to receive. Lots of times his playfulness can be leveraged—he loves to use his turboboosters to race you to the bathroom—but other times it gets in the way—he might not stop playing with a cat toy long enough to actually do what he's supposed to do.

But I think our relationship is improving. He's more like me than Child One in some ways, especially his sense of humor and his desire to tease and be teased. For a long time, I think I often ended up focusing on Child One while my wife focused on Son Two, for lots of good and understandable reasons, but I've been trying to redress that balance a bit. He's into playing games like "hug monster" and he likes spinning imaginary stories with me; he had fun pretending we were driving a stolen car when we were doing Christmas shopping, for example! Some of his bad tendencies he definitely picks up from observing his older sibling, who struggles with violence.

He's starting to figure out reading; he knows all his letters and the sounds they make, but we haven't hit that phonics breakthrough of putting them together to sound out words. Of course, he's only in pre-K, so that's fine! 

His favorite "treat" is chocolate. Santa (i.e., my mother) put a bag of chocolate chips in his stocking, and never was a kid more ecstatic on Christmas morning.

I look forward to seeing how he continues to grow up over the next year. Hopefully he gets a real birthday again.

Reading The Patchwork Bride of Oz Aloud to My Kid—We Begin Our Journey into the Noncanonical!

As chronicled at length here on this blog, my kid and I spent several years reading all the "official" Oz books: the Famous Forty plus other books written by Royal Historians, published by the Oz Club, or authorized by the Baum Estate. This project took sixty-two books and four years.

What next? Well, it turns out my kids literally don't know of a world where you don't read a chapter of an Oz book every other day, so we're turning our attention to the so-called noncanonical Oz apocrypha. We (largely) read the official Oz books in publication order, but I decided to handle these differently. I made a list of all the noncanonical Oz books that either 1) I already owned, or 2) I didn't own but thought sounded interesting, and then used a random number generator to select one. In between them, we'll be reading stories by L. Frank Baum from the Oz Club collection of his complete short stories.

The Patchwork Bride of Oz by Gilbert M. Sprague
illustrated by Denis McFarling

Published: 1993
Acquired and previously read: 199?
Read aloud: July 2025

The first spin of the dice brings us to The Patchwork Bride of Oz, one of the many continuation novels released by Books of Wonder's Emerald City Press imprint in the 1990s. Though at the time I devoured them, in retrospect the quality was... inconsistent at best. This one is surely a case in point. A story of how the Scarecrow and Scraps the Patchwork Girl get married (their flirtation was established back in Scraps's original appearance, but little had been done with it since), it runs a mere three (unnumbered and untitled) chapters across 38 pages; the book is padded at the end with some pictures of Scraps and the Scarecrow by John R. Neill reproduced from other Oz books.

Reading it as an adult, it's pretty bad. Scraps and the Scarecrow only decide to get married because the Love Magnet makes them. Wow, what romance. My kid was pretty confused by this part, and expected it to be undone and/or explained, which is totally reasonable. It is not. They then do get married. The Wogglebug criticizes Scraps's choice of attire, and the Scarecrow can't decide what suit to wear, but otherwise there are no obstacles or plot. The characters live together a little, but then decide that they miss their old lives, so go back to them. The end. 

Like, why? What was the point of this? It reads like particularly bad fanfiction, by someone who doesn't know how stories are supposed to work. Why publish this? I have never read Oziana (the official short story magazine of the Oz Club) but surely it published better work than this.

Going into the "noncanonical" books, I warned my kid their unofficial status meant some might contain things that would go unreflected in others. Once we finished Patchwork Bride, I said there would be no other Oz book where Scraps and the Scarecrow were married. That was okay, they said... this book must just take place after all of those! Already a timeliner at heart.

Incidentally, I was trying to fill out Gilbert M. Sprague's LibraryThing author page and found very little to go on out there. I found obituaries for a couple different Gilbert M. Spragues, both the right age to have written this book, but in neither case was there any good evidence to link them to Oz. So if you know when he was born, when/if he died, where he lived, I'd be interested to hear it. I did find a brief but interesting mention of him on a blog about gay youth in the 1970s, though, where the writer calls him "my friend and sometimes lover Gilbert Sprague (who went on to write two books in the ongoing Oz series, along with editing the monthly Oz fanzine for Books of Wonder)."

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?

---

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!)

My Kid and the Silver Age of Comics

My older kid turned six this past summer; that's also when their ability to read on their own really took off, as they began to read through simple chapter books. Pokémon novelizations were a key entry point; they'd gotten a bunch for Christmas, but we'd said we weren't going to read them, they would need to learn how to read them themself! (My wife and I enjoy reading aloud to our kids a lot, but I don't believe that anyone enjoys reading Pokémon novelizations aloud.)

Once they mastered all the Pokémon novels, we needed to find enough for them to read. We began picking up books at our local library, easy chapter books and kid graphic novels.

At a certain point—I forget exactly when this happened, but I want to say September, they declared they would only read graphic novels. No more prose fiction! They haven't totally stuck to this, but they have pretty much done so. As an English professor, I might kind of be disappointed, but as someone who grew up reading media tie-ins, I know there's actually nothing wrong with it!

The problem with this, though, is that many children's graphic novels are very easy reads. We'd get them a whole stack of books, and it seemed like they'd zip through it in less than an hour! We were getting all sorts of stuff: Dog Man, The Lunch Lady, Max and the Midknights, The First Cat in Space, and they were just blowing through it. 

Mostly my wife picked out this stuff. I did request some kids and YA superhero graphic novels, which they seemed into: Dear Justice League, Diana: Princess of the Amazons, Green Lantern: Legacy. I also picked a lot of stuff based on the various tv series, figuring if it tied into the various kid-appropriate tv shows, it was probably kid-appropriate itself, stuff based on Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Justice League Unlimited and Teen Titans Go and the old Batman/Superman cartoons. The problem with venturing outside of either of these spheres, though, is that most contemporary superhero comics are very much not appropriate for a six-year-old, with too much sex and gruesome violence. Imagine your kid reading a Geoff Johns comic where Black Adam punches someone's head off!

After reading some JLU comics, they asked me for more Justice League stuff; searching the library catalogue, I realized our system owned several volumes of Justice League: The Silver Age, collections of the original run of Justice League of America back in the 1960s. I figured it was worth a shot.

It very much was! The nice thing about Silver Age comics is that they are totally appropriate for a six-year-old, because back then comics were actually aimed at kids! Not only that, but many of the things an adult reader now finds goofy turn out to be great, because those old Silver Age writers knew their audience. As an adult, I roll my eyes at Snapper Carr—my kid is psyched that the JLA hangs out with a kid like them! As an adult, you roll your eyes at those stories where suddenly Superman is being bad for some contrived reason—my kid is like, Dad, why is Superman going around breaking things!?

And, here's the real upside to reading 1960s comics: they used to have so many words back then! My kid has to positively labor to get through these. They're enjoying it, but boy does it take time. 

They ended up requesting I get every "Silver Age" collection our library owned; in addition to reading JLA, they've also read or are reading World's Finest, Teen Titans, Green Lantern, and Suicide Squad. In some cases, our library doesn't own all of them, so we've had to ILL missing volumes. In some cases, they've exhausted what DC has reprinted in the "Silver Age" collections (which seem to have come to an end, alas), so we've switched to Showcase Presents for World's Finest and Teen Titans; at first they were opposed to the books being black and white, but eventually they came around. 

Unfortunately, a lot of this Silver Age material is only reprinted in big hardcover omnibus volumes, which aren't really good for a six-year-old! I'm a bit surprised, to be honest; hopefully DC Finest plugs some of these gaps. I know DC keeps pumping out graphic novels for current kids, but clearly the stuff from the 1960s and '70s appeals to current kids, too, and I don't see why it's not more readily available.

And maybe like all children of the 2020s, they're a total sucker for all the multiverse stuff; now that they've read all the Justice League: The Silver Age volumes (as well as a one-off collection of stories from Denny O'Neil's "satellite era"), I'm trying to track down the Crisis on Multiple Earths collections for them.

Along the way, they've read a few comics from my collection: some of Walter Simonson's The Mighty Thor, an issue of Lee and Kirby's The Fantastic Four. Just today they asked me about The Legion of Super-Heroes (of which I own eleven of the thirteen archive editions). But mostly we keep these in reserve, for when they've run out of library books!

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

Almost Heaven (As Usual, Again)

"Why do we sing about West Virginia, Dad?"

Kid Two cheesing with his Aunt Cat

This is the question Kid One (now six, and on their sixth Mollmann Thanksgiving) asked me Friday night after the traditional Mollmann hot dog roast. I explained that the Mollmanns have been congregating in state parks for Thanksgiving for over fifty years now, and that in those old days, when it was just my grandparents and their five children, they used to go to Pipestem State Park in West Virginia. So even though we haven't gone to West Virginia since 2008 (too far for my grandmother these days), we still sing John Denver's "Country Roads." It is nothing to be proud of, but what (most of) the Mollmanns lack in musical aptitude, (some of) the Mollmanns make up for with enthusiasm... though for some reason the lyrics of the second verse continue to evade many of us. I recorded it this year, out of a sort of morbid curiosity, but I haven't yet had the courage to listen back to it.

These traditions are important, of course, they keep us who we are. Every Thanksgiving the Mollmanns congregate in a state park, we eat chili for dinner Thursday, we go hiking during the days. My own little unit of the Mollmanns has acquired its own traditions, too; I have to teach  the week of Thanskgiving but my wife doesn't, so my wife and kids fly out Saturday and spend some time with my wife's family, while I don't join them until Tuesday. It's more work for her, of course, but I think she really appreciates getting to spend that extended quality time with her mother, and the kids get a lot out of it, too.

Kid One tastes their first(ish) snowfall

Kid One can be resistant to changes in routine—I feel like last year they were particularly anti-hiking—but now I think we've done it enough that the kids recognize the annual routine themselves, and thus come to find it comforting as well. They were both enthusiastic, engaged hikers this year. I would say it was an above-average Thanksgiving for them. The last couple years, we've stayed in three or four medium-sized lodges, this year we stayed in two big ones. This meant that my immediate family stayed with a couple others, and thus my kids got to spend more time with my cousins' kids of similar ages, which was quite nice. Kid One declared another cousin their friend once they spent some time listening to Kid One's Yoto together (but could not, of course, remember her name), while Kid Two kept bossing around another kid who was two years older than him!

Most excitingly, they got to experience a snowfall! As Florida babies, their experiences with snow have been few and far between. It did snow when we were in Cleveland for Christmas in (I believe) 2021, but neither of them remember this, so it was very exciting, even though by Ohio standards we're talking a light dusting. "Is it Christmas?" Kid Two asked my wife. No, not yet, buddy.

After I explained the origins of Mollmann Thanksgiving, Kid One declared we ought to back to West Virginia. I don't know that the Mollmann clan can make this happen, probably the logistics are too complicated when Mollmann Thanksgiving has something like fifty total attendees. But tradition is important, and if I ever get the opportunity, I'd like to take my family back to where it all began, back to what they claim is "almost heaven."

My Kid and the Dragons Franchise

I haven't done a lot of parental blogging recently, so I thought I would write up what was honestly a pretty minor moment—but that is how I envision this blog, so there you go.

Last Wednesday, I picked up my six-year-old ("Kid One") from their aftercare program. Sometimes Kid One doesn't tell me anything  about their day, but this week, they were nice and chatty. Among other things, they informed me that they had come up with a new Dragons game. I later learned my wife knew about these games, but I didn't. The newest is the twelfth installment, Dragon Claws. When I asked if these were things they wrote or drew, they informed me that no, they just dreamed them up. There's the original Dragons (when I called it "Dragons 1" at some point, I was corrected that it was just Dragons), and then Dragons 2 through Dragons 11. Dragons 5 and 6 are "Dragons Mega" and Dragons 7 through 9 are "Dragons Mega Mega."

Apparently they play these games at recess with their friend (whom I'll call "Connor"). When we got home, it was a little early, and they had missed the recess component of aftercare because I picked up Kid One a bit earlier than mom usually does, so I suggested we play a Dragons game outside. They said I could pick which one, but when I said start from the beginning, they said they didn't remember the original Dragons, so we played Dragons 2 instead.

In Dragons 2, there's a dragon and a warrior; I was the warrior, and they were the dragon. (When Kid One and Connor play, Connor is usually the warrior as well.) First I had to defeat the dragon, then I captured the dragon in my dragonball and registered it to my dragonphone. After that, we battled together against a number of threats (the ones I remember are the flying "Rampagers") and the dragon, originally named "Attacker," evolved a couple times.

Obviously you can identify what their inspirations are! I was struck how Kid One is very obviously my kid, in that they look at systems of narrative and break them down and figure them out. They have already figured out the structure of a game franchise! I love seeing them enthusiastic  and energetic and imaginative; I had to do very little prompting, they mostly told me everything that was happening and came up with all the ideas. I was pretty tired, so we left off once we finished Dragons 2, but I am promised that our progress and characters will carry over into Dragons 3 when we play it!

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