My recent research on The Master Key led me to pick up some Baum books I never encountered when I was a humble Oz-obsessed youth, and this was one of them. Animal Fairy Tales is a collection of fairy tales with animals for protagonists, as you might guess. Some of them are fun, but most of them moralize to some extent, which is disappointing, as Baum is never at his best when adopting a moral tone. They're curiously un-American in some ways, as most of them feature dynastic animal monarchies, but then Baum was always pretty inconsistent about the merits of monarchy vs. democracy in his fantasy. Despite the moralizing, I enjoyed "The Discontented Gopher", which is about a gopher who takes riches over contentment and suffers for it, but my favorite was probably "The Forest Oracle", as it is a classic Baumian con-man-makes-good story. "The Pea-Green Poodle" was also enjoyable-- mostly for the image the title conjures-- and I also like the mythical feel of "The Enchanted Buffalo". A decent set of stories, but Baum has certainly done better work.