L. Frank Baum (1856–1919)

I feel sorry for L. Frank Baum. Dorothy was so popular that his audience clamored for more of her, but this book proves that she really is not needed. A very entertaining story in which Baum brings in Dorothy at the end simply to make his readers happy. The story could easily have been written without her and would probably have been even better. I enjoyed Rinkitink and Bilbil very much. And Prince Inga was a strong serious heroic character who shouldn't have needed any help from Oz. I wish show more he'd been able to write what he wanted and not what his audience demanded because his imagination really knew no bounds. show less

I read this aloud to my four-year-old son between Oz novels. Like many of Baum's early books, you can (retrospectively, at least) look back and see why Wonderful Wizard worked and this did not. "Dot" and "Tot" are two small children—she a child of privilege whose father buys a country estate just so she can get some fresh air, he the child of the estate's gardener—who fall asleep in a boat while exploring, which comes unmoored and drifts down an underground river into Merryland. show more Merryland is a country divided into seven valleys, which are home to, in turn, clowns, candy, babies, dolls, cats, wind-up animals, and lost things. Dot and Tot basically drift from valley to valley, interacting with each one's inhabitants and then moving on; there's no real quest here except for a vague sense they want to get home. It's nowhere near as purposeful as Dorothy's trip to Oz; it's much more akin to the seemingly purposeless wanderings in The Sea Fairies, The Enchanted Island of Yew, and The Master Key.

On the other hand, it lacks the violence of the latter two, and for a kid hearing a chapter every day, that kind of focus matters less. He had fun hearing about each strange place in turn, which is clearly what Baum wanted.

Baum's wild imagination is on display here; though some of the valleys aren't very interesting (cats, clowns), others are filled with neat ideas and evocative imagery, such as the Valley of Babies, where babies fall from the sky in giant blossoms, and are tended to by storks until they are ready to be carried to the outside world to be born. Mr. Split, the man who can split himself into two parts is a great concept, and the Valley of Lost Things is suitably creepy and forlorn. In the Valley of Dolls, Dot and Tot are joined by the Queen of Merryland, who goes to the remaining valleys with them, thus removing what modicum of danger there was. The idea that she kind of needs to force them to stay by adopting them is interesting, but at the end of the book, she just changes her mind and lets them leave anyway.

We read the 1990s Books of Wonder edition, which replaces the original illustrations by W. W. Denslow with new ones by Donald Abbott, which are clearly designed to emulate Denslow's as much as possible. They're nice enough.

(Worldbuilding implications: the book indicates that there are "real" clowns from the Valley of Clowns in Merryland, who go into the outside world to entertain children, and fake clowns, who are just humans putting on make-up. This means Notta Bit More from Cowardly Lion is a fake clown... which is, frankly, not too surprising. Does the Valley of Clowns have any connection to Oz's Play City, a settlement of pierrettes and pierrots in the Winkie Country from Grampa in Oz?) show less

When I was younger I happened to see a film that many people seem to not know about these days. Yes, it has a cult following, but for the most part it is just an oddity lost in the sands of times. The film is a non-musical sequel to The Wizard of Oz and opens with Dorothy in an insane asylum, everyone convinced she's crazy since she keeps going on and on about Oz. She escapes, is returned to Oz in a storm, and commences to have many adventures with a mechanical man named Tik-Tok and a sassy show more talking hen named Billina (-ina having been added to her original name, Bill, to make it more feminine since Dorothy can't call her Bill.)

Did I also mention one of the villains were creatures called Wheelers that look like something out of Mad Max?


WITNESS ME

I mention all of this, because the bulk of what Return to Oz featured was taken from non-other than this book. The talking chicken, the Wheelers, Tik-Tok, it's all here along with some of the darker bits. There is no insane asylum for Dorothy, but there is some pretty nasty situations that they get into in the land of Ev before Ozma arrives. Even after Ozma arrives, the quest to release the Royal Family of Ev from their imprisonment by the Nome King is no easy task and many might be lost in the trying of it...

I adored this book. Bellina is a wonderful addition and really quite Ozzy. I love the dedication to his readers that starts each volume, and [a: Frank L Baum|3242|L. Frank Baum|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1383720421p2/3242.jpg]'s appreciation for the children he writes for. I love how noble the characters are, how magical the land is, an how utterly insane everything seems. The spirit of Fairy Land is quite real in these books, along with the manifold perils such Fairy Land's often contain. Can't wait to read more!

P.S. The Hungry Tiger is a riot. Someone get him a fat baby. show less

With this, my three-year-old son and I came to the end of L. Frank Baum's contributions to the Oz mythos. This was his fourteenth and final Oz novel, which we read about eleven months after we started back with Wonderful Wizard (though as we've taken a couple detours on the way, this was our eighteenth Oz book together).

Like many of the late novels, I remembered little of it, but I did remember the Flatheads and the Skeezers. These are two warring tribes in the Gillikin Country: the show more Flatheads' heads stop at their brows, so they have to carry their brains around in cans, while the Skeezers live in a great domed city that can be submerged in a lake. Beyond this and a scene that appears on the cover of the Del Rey edition, though, I remembered little of it.

Like a lot of the later Baum books, I don't think it's a favorite, but I did enjoy it. It's distinctly a novel of two halves. The first half could actually be called Ozma of Oz, except that we already had that book, for it's the book that focuses on the princess of Oz more than any other of the original fourteen. Ozma isn't really the protagonist of any of the Oz books after her transformation from Tip, not even the one called Ozma of Oz, but here she's the co-protagonist with Dorothy. Emerald City established Ozma's pacifist ethos, and this novel explores that in detail, along with what it means for Ozma to be a fairy. (I think Scarecrow was the first book to call Ozma a fairy, something not very consistent with the backstory she received in Marvelous Land or Dorothy and the Wizard.)

Anyway, when Ozma hears about the war between the Skeezers and the Flatheads, she's determined to stop it—but to stop it by showing the Skeezers and the Flatheads a better way to behave, not by using force or anything. We also get an explanation from Ozma of how her fairy magic differs from the sorecery of Glinda and the wizardry of the Wizard: fairy magic is innate and doesn't need tools (though Ozma's magic wand seems to help), while sorcery and wizardry are more powerful but require learning and tools to implement. There's some good problem-solving by Ozma and Dorothy, too. Ozma is ultimately ineffectual in stopping the war, though, despite her pleas; and she and Dorothy ends up trapped in the underwater city of the Skeezers.

The second half of the book, then, shifts focus to Glinda, along with a subplot about a Skeezer named Ervic trying to disenchant some fish. Glinda makes a rescue party: she needs to raise the submerged city, and we see her and the Wizard trying various means of doing this, and we see how their magic is more mechanical than that of Ozma. Though Glinda is well-organized, she's actually not very effectual, either; Scraps has the key idea that enables them to get into the city, Ervic cleverly tricks a Yookoohoo into disenchanting the fish (revealing them to be Adepts at Magic), and Dorothy figures out the magic word that operates the city. It's not a very high-stakes novel; another writer might impose some kind of deadline on raising the city, but Baum goes to great pains to establish that no one is in any danger! It actually has the feel of some Golden Age science fiction to me, a group of competent people working together to reason their way through a problem. So like Magic of Oz, I enjoyed read it on a chapter to chapter basis even if ultimately it kind of doesn't add up to much as you feel it might.

A large number of characters go with Glinda to help raise the Skeezer city, but unlike in some of his other books, Baum is less effective at giving them all something to do. Button-Bright has a nice scene of getting lost and told off by Glinda, but the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion, Tik-Tok, Jack Pumpkinhead, Professor Woggle-Bug, the Shaggy Man, Uncle Henry, Cap'n Bill and Trot, the Glass Cat, and Betsy Bobbin are all there too, and most of them just fill out crowd scenes. It's nice for Baum to get so many favorite characters into his last novel, but I wish some of them had even got just one scene where they did something.

Like Magic, this felt influenced by the Great War then recently concluded: Ozma has to stop a war between two nations who have been usurped by dictators, a war their citizens don't want. Because of this, I used German accents for most of the Flatheads, and French for most of the Skeezers.

My son seemed to enjoy this one, though he was a bit worried that the submerged city wouldn't be raised. He even drew his own picture of the Skeezer and Flathead cities, but unfortunately I can't find it to scan it. I do have this picture of Ozma's palace in the Emerald City that he drew.

More on what he drew, what he thought, and the experience of reading the Baum books overall on my blog. show less