Ruth Plumly Thompson (1891–1976)

I owned all of L. Frank Baum's Oz books growing up, and read them all many times. I only owned two Ruth Plumly Thompson ones, her last two canonical ones (which we will come to eventually, I suppose). Hers were not very commonly reprinted after their original Reilly & Lee editions. I did, however, read them all, or at least most of them: my mother helped middle-school me navigate the dial-up catalogue of the 1990s in order to request them all through interlibrary loan! That said, I have show more absolutely no memory of most of them; the titles don't even spark slight chords of memory in my mind. So, rereading them to my three-year-old son is more akin to reading them for the first time.

Kabumpo in Oz has a couple parallel plots. In one, the old Nome King (or "Gnome King," as Thompson spells it), Ruggedo, has regained his memory since the events of Magic of Oz and has carved out a "kingdom" for himself underneath the Emerald City... a kingdom with just two subjects, a rabbit named Wag (for whom Ruggedo steals shiny things from the city) and a wooden doll named Peg Amy (which Ruggedo stole from Trot). Ruggedo finds a boxed of "mixed magic" buried under the Emerald City, which he uses to bring Peg Amy to life, and then to enlarge Peg Amy, Wag, and... himself! Because he's standing under Ozma's palace when this happens, he ends up with the palace on his giant head and he freaks out and runs away to Ev. This interrupts a party Dorothy is having, meaning that her, along with Scraps, the Scarecrow, Tik-Tok, Trot, Betsy Bobbin, Sir Hokus, and Ozma, are all trapped in the palace on the head of the old Nome King.

Meanwhile, Prince Pompadore of Pumperdink, a tiny kingdom in the Gillikin Country, is having his tenth eighteenth birthday party (since people in Oz don't age) when the cake explodes. A magic scroll declares that if he doesn't marry a "proper fairy princess," Pumperdink will disappear. His father wants to marry him off to an old fairy crone who is the princess of a nearby magic forest, but Kabumpo the Elegant Elephant, a favorite in the court of Pumperdink, thinks that the only fairy princess in Oz good enough for Pompa is Ozma herself, and so Pompa and Kabumpo sneak out of Pumperdink in the middle of the night to go to the Emerald City and ask for Ozma's hand in marriage.

They have some adventures on the way, and by the time they get there, of course, Ozma's palace is gone, so they go on a quest with Wag and Peg Amy to retrieve the palace and defeat Ruggedo—an action they hope will prove that Pompa is worthy of Ozma's hand, even if by this point his fancy clothes are in tatters and his hair all got burnt off by a well-meaning living candle in the Illumi Nation.

I really liked this. Thompson's trademark puns come a bit thick and fast at times and often go over the head of my son (e.g., they meet living numbers, who don't have heads for figures, but do have figures for heads), but the characters work. Pompa is quiet and unassuming but has a nobility to him; Peg Amy is kind and can deflate the pomposity of anyone she meets; Wag is passionate and impetuous; Kabumpo is pretentious but ultimately well-meaning. The three non-human characters were all fun to read aloud.

Especially once all four are adventuring together, they make a great group. I liked the bickering between Kabumpo and Wag, and the way Peg Amy could calm Kabumpo down. In Royal Book, Thompson mostly stuck to Baum's characters as protagonists (with the exception of Sir Hokus), but here, she shows she can make her own characters that feel that they belong in Oz every bit, but also aren't the kind of characters Baum would write. Questing princes are a traditional fairy tale trope that Baum wasn't interested in for the Oz books. (Rinkitink aside, but I guess that wasn't meant to be an Oz book.)

The plotting might be a bit contrived. It takes days for Pompa and Kabump to get to the Emerald City, and then to Ev, so Thompson has to keep the Emerald City characters out of the action because otherwise they could easily solve their own problems. Basically, at the exact moment they begin making headway, the Sandman happens to trip over Ozma's palace and spill sleep sand everywhere, meaning everyone (bar the Scarecrow, Scraps, and Tik-Tok, of course) sleeps until Pompa shows up to save them. But, to be honest, I was entertained along the way, and I never minded.

What makes the book really work is the last few chapters. Ozma turning down Pompa's proposal is a moment both hilarious and touching; Kabumpo in particular is anguished. Doesn't she know how these kind of stories work? A princess can't turn down a prince who saves her! Is it Pompa's hair? The group consults the magic question box contained in the assortment of mixed magic, and it tells them that Pompa's "proper princess" is actually the Princess of Sun Top Mountain, a small kingdom in the Winkie Country.

The book has an emotional climax—something that I honestly don't think Baum ever even attempted in his Oz novels. As Pompa approaches Sun Top Mountain, he begins to mourn that he won't be able to go adventuring with his newfound friends anymore. Thompson has really succeeded in making their bond seem meaningful, so this is genuinely melancholic. The trip into Sun Top Mountain is kind of eerie, and as Pompa professes that he loves Peg Amy, he finds out that she (for somewhat complicated reasons) is the princess of Sun Top Mountain. It's a really well done moment of emotional catharsis.

For me, it elevates what was a good Oz novel into a great one, and my son had a pretty big reaction to the revelation of Peg Amy's true identity, too. He seemed to enjoy the novel on the whole; you can't do wrong by an elephant! He was already asking me if we would read about Kabumpo, Pompa, and company in future novels. (Thompson uses Kabumpo as co-protagonist in several of her novels, though I don't think Pompa and Peg Amy ever have a big role again. We'll see I guess!) show less

I continue to be fascinated by what differences Ruth Plumly Thompson introduces to Oz storytelling. In both Baum and Thompson books, characters often have to get from point A to point B, and on the way keep bumping into what some Oz fans call IEs (which I think stands for "irrelevant enclaves"): random weird communities that the characters briefly interact with, and then leave, but which don't affect the actual plot of the novel. (I kind of reject this characterizations of "IEs," and thus show more the concept of them, but that's not really my point here.)

They each handle this basic concept very differently, though. In a Baum book, the characters will usually travel sedately for a bit, come to a community, interact with its inhabitants, then leave and travel sedately some more until they come to the next one. Road to Oz, Emerald City, and Lost Princess are all good examples of Oz books that use this format. In a Thompson novel, though, the characters plunge from place to place; it's very manic. You might escape one, but on a vehicle you can't control, so you're immediately in another, and then another, and then another. And the people in each community almost always want to do something to you: slam doors on you, throw you off the edge, put you into jars. In a Baum book, you would visit three communities in three days; half a Thompson book can take place on a single day in which the characters visit three communities. It's a very different tone, and sometimes I felt like my three-year-old son struggled to keep up with the action in this one. I don't know that it's a problem per se, but it gives Thompson's Oz a less peaceful tone: at any place you visit, there's liable to be something dangerous you need to get away from.

On the other hand, this approach lets her do what I am realizing is one of her key moves: the bonding through adversity. This was at the forefront of both Cowardly Lion and Kabumpo, and it's there to a lesser extent with Sir Hokus in Royal Book. But let me step back a bit. Despite the title, the initial protagonists of Cowardly Lion are two Americans: Notta Bit More, a circus clown, and Bobbie "Bob Up" Downs, an orphan from Philadelphia. When a magic Oz rhyme pops into Notta's head, both he and Bob are whisked to the country of Mudge, a desert community in a corner of the Munchkin country. The king of Mudge, Mustafa, is mad for lions, but Ozma has forbidden his people from leaving Mudge because they steal too much, on pain of losing their heads. (I guess this isn't as bad as it sounds when you remember no one in Oz can die.) Every lion in Mudge has been captured, so Mustafa uses his magic to force Notta and Bob to travel to the Emerald City and capture the Cowardly Lion for him. The first several chapters thus chronicle their adventures.

Meanwhile, the Cowardly Lion is having one of his period bouts of self-doubt over his cowardliness; I liked the comparison to the Soldier with the Green Whiskers. (The Lion is always afraid but never runs; the Soldier is never afraid because he knows he can always run—and he always does!) Scraps makes a joking suggestion that if he ate a brave man, he'd have a lot of bravery inside him, so he runs off to the Munchkin country to find a brave man to eat. In a complete coincidence (though honestly it didn't bother me very much), he runs into Notta and Bob. Notta and Bob keep secret that they intend to capture him, but the Lion keeps secret that he almost ate Notta, and they all go adventuring together. Eventually, though, they meet Nick/Snorer, the bird with the telephone beak, and Notta confesses the truth to the Lion, and they have to come up with a plan to escape that fulfills the requirements of the magic Mustafa has placed on them. It's through their adventures that Thompson portrays a real sense of bonding between the group, especially when the Lion must fight dozens of Feathermen to prevent Notta and Bob from being tossed of the "skyle" (a sky isle) of Un in what is really a tremendous sequence showing how courageous the Lion is despite his ostensible cowardice. As I said when I reviewed Royal Book, I think Thompson has a great handle on the Cowardly Lion.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. The excursion to Un is good; I particularly liked a very belabored set-up for a very bad pun about a dog they meet in the sky. Some commenters don't seem to like Notta, especially his habit of wearing weird disguises (across the course of the book, he disguises himself as a lion, a bear, a hunter, and a fish, and it's always the wrong disguise for the situation), but it seems to me that it plays into a theme of embracing who you are: Notta finds in Oz a place where he can be a clown all the time, and everyone likes him for it, while the Cowardly Lion comes to realize that the only way to not be afraid is to not be alive. Both have to be who they are.

This latter bit, though, I felt could have been handled slightly better; another character forces the Lion to become a statue so that he will no longer feel fear, but I think it would have been stronger if the Lion had chosen it, and then found out that he didn't actually want what he thought he wanted. Instead, he's reached this realization sort of anticlimactically earlier, and then he gets turned into a statue.

Like Sir Hokus at the end of Royal Book, Notta and Bob find a place where their very oddness means that they fit in perfectly. (Unlike Sir Hokus, though, I don't think Notta and Bob ever appear in any other Oz books, though, even though the narrator tells us Bob became good friends with Button-Bright.) I liked that Thompson remembered the Wizard had been a circus man himself, and it's a very charming conclusion as Notta establishes Oz's first circus.

Even if you don't otherwise like the disguise aspect, it's all worth it for a part where Notta decides that the people of the Emerald City are so magic that they won't accept him unless he's magic, so puts on a witch disguise before entering the city. In a humorous sequence, Dorothy is the first to see him and promptly dumps a bucket of water on his head!

We've also had good fun reciting the magic rhyme that can be used to send yourself or other people to Oz: "Udge! Budge! / Go to Mudge! / Udger budger, / You're a Mudger!" Though then he wanted to know why it doesn't work when we do it!

Cowardly Lion of Oz entered the public domain in 2019, and none of the major Oz publishers have done an edition of it. The best extant edition (short of paying $150+ for a vintage Reilly & Lee, which my wife vetoed for some reason) was I able to find was from SeaWolf Press. SeaWolf has done print-on-demand editions of the first nineteen Oz books, which they confusingly and inaccurately call the "Illustrated First Editions." The text is reset (so my edition of Cowardly Lion runs 199 pages as opposed to the original's 291), but it purports to contain all the original illustrations; the color plates are reprinted in black and white. I think the text was probably sourced from Project Gutenberg, and there are occasionally some errors when it comes to turning Gutenberg's "straight" quotation marks into “curly” ones. In addition, one picture is included twice, and there's one spot where there's a random blank line between paragraphs. (Plus, there are typos, but given there are often a lot of typos in the actual Reilly & Lee books, these may be "accurate" in a sense!) So it could be slightly better, but for a $9 copy of a book that has barely ever been reprinted, you could do a lot worse! (I do dislike that they put Baum's name on the spine, though, and not Thompson's.) show less

There's a game you can play when you read a Ruth Plumly Thompson Oz novel: which L. Frank Baum book did she reread before writing it? In some cases this is very obvious: she must have reread The Marvelous Land of Oz before writing Lost King and Patchwork Girl before writing Ojo in Oz. In other cases, it's not so obvious but you can make a good argument for it: some small details in Pirates in Oz, for example, make it seem as though Thompson had recently reread Rinkitink in Oz.

Along those show more lines, I would like to suggest that before writing Speedy in Oz, Thompson must have read not an Oz book, but one by L. Frank Baum nonetheless: Sky Island. The obvious link is that both novels largely take place on floating islands. But I would argue it goes beyond this: Speedy in Oz does something that I think is unique in the annals of Thompson's Oz novels, and almost unique in terms of Oz stories more broadly... it all takes place in a single location! This is a Thompson novel without a single "irrelevant enclave"; like Sky Island, the novel is about our protagonists being in a particular place and needing to solve the problems of that place in order to solve their own problems. I don't think there's any other Oz novel like it, though I can think of some that come close, albeit none of them by Thompson (e.g., Ozma of Oz, Scarecrow of Oz, Glinda of Oz).

But let's set the stage. Speedy in Oz (which surely ought to have been called something like The Umbrella Island of Oz, let's be honest) brings back Speedy, the boy protagonist from Yellow Knight, who my four-year-old son did not even remember even though we read it only six months / four books ago, but that didn't really matter. Speedy comes across a dinosaur skeleton in Yellowstone, which has been excavated by a paleontologist. Speedy and his inventor uncle reassemble it... right on top of a geyser! When the geyser erupts, Speedy and the skeleton are thrown into the air, and the force of the blast fuses the bones of the skeleton back together... and grants it life!? They fly through the air for hours before finally landing on Umbrella Island. My wife was listening as I read this bit aloud and she expressed her disbelief. There's no explanation given as to why something seemingly magical would take place, and indeed, later the characters seem fairly certain that if the dinosaur (who gets named Terrybubble) returned to America, its life would cease again. I think by this point Thompson had kind of given up on putting thought into how people got to Oz; to write an Oz book, you have to get some young American there fairly promptly and your audience knows and expects that, so why waste time explaining it too much? And you've got to have some kind of living animal or other grotesque, so why put too much work into explaining that either? (It hangs better together than in Giant Horse, where a living statue in America falls through the ground and somehow ends up in the Munchkin country.)

Umbrella Island, however, has been having problem. Asleep at the wheel, King Sizzeroo crashed it into the giant Loxo the Lucky, and Loxo has demanded Sizzeroo's daughter (who he thinks is a boy), the princess Gureeda (as in "go read a book," since that's all she does), in recompense; the island has six months to cough her up, and Loxo has a magic magnet that can pull the island back to him no matter where it flees. But when Speedy lands on the island, one of Sizzeroo's advisors notices that if dressed in similar clothes, Speedy could pass for Gureeda... so why not convince him to live on the island and hand him over instead? So Speedy and Terrybubble begin to integrate themselves into life on the island but there's this undercurrent of threat in the background.

It all works brilliantly, I would say. Thompson loves her small kingdoms with childlike rulers and comedy advisors (sometimes good and sometimes evil; see Pumperdink, Mudge, Ragbad, Kimbaloo, Rash, Patch, and many many more), but setting a whole novel in the same one lets her flesh out its dimensions and characters, none is wholly good or wholly bad, and certainly my son was able to keep track of the various advisors for one of the first times (with the occasional nudge). Terrybubble is a great animal character; he's a giant dinosaur skeleton... but all he wants to be is Speedy's loyal dog! There's some good problem-solving, something Thompson sometimes neglects in her novels; here, Umbrella Island crash-lands in the Nonestic Ocean and the steering mechanism seizes up... with Umbrella Island stuck right between the warring islands of Roaraway and Norroway. So it's up to Speedy to come up with a way to save the island, not knowing that even if he does, the islanders will do him in. Pansy the Watchcat is another of Thompson's fun rhyming animal characters. (Shades of Sky Island's rhyming parrot, actually!) There's even an undercurrent of romance to the whole thing, as Speedy is falling for Gureeda, but also frustrated with her bookish ways.

In the end, Terrybubble overhears the king and his advisor discussing the plan, and steals away with Speedy and Gureeda in the night, only to inadvertently land right on Big Enough Mountain, home of Loxo. My one complaint is that Speedy plays little role in the climax of the book bearing his name, but maybe his moment of heroism with Roarway is enough to counteract that.

The whole thing has a very different tone and feel to other Thompson novels, and both me and my son really enjoyed it. In fact, it was Thompson's favorite of her own books; I think my favorite is probably still Kabumpo, but this would come in second.

Certainly our enjoyment was enhanced by the edition we read being an International Wizard of Oz Club facsimile of the original Reilly & Lee; this was far better than the SeaWolfs and Del Reys we've been reading for most Thompson. Excellent color plates as always from John R. Neill, and when reproduced at proper size, his black-and-white illustrations add so much liveliness to the world of the text. My son was so happy to have color pictures for the first time in a long while, and we spent a bit of time flipping back and forth through them. The Oz Club is out of copies of Speedy, but I found it pretty easy to get a reasonably priced used copy on the secondary market. Alas, I think we have just one Oz book with color pictures to go (the Oz Club's edition of Wishing Horse), because starting with Captain Salt, the originals were black and white to begin with.

It ends on a melancholy note: Speedy would be welcome to stay on Umbrella Island, but feels he has to return home to hand over the schematics of Roaraway's water gun to his inventor uncle. It is, after all, 1934 and there is a war coming. If I've got my sums right, Speedy would be about eighteen when war actually does break out (for America, anyway) in 1941 and thus eligible to join the Navy as he desires here. I understand there's an Oziana short story about Speedy returning to Umbrella Island, but I find myself curious about what kind of adventures he might have had in the real world as an adult.

But, the narrator tells us that Umbrella Island flies into the outside world sometimes, Terrybubble leaning over the edge to see if he can find Speedy once again, rope ladder lowered so he can climb aboard. It's a bit sad to imagine Terrybubble forever pining for his lost master, but the narrator says probably Speedy will return and become king one day. However, the narrator says that if you see the island float over your house one night, then you should climb right up the rope ladder.

"Dad!" my son exclaimed upon hearing this, "Oz is real!"

And indeed, in Speedy, it really does feel like it is. show less

It seems to me that Thompson kind of works her way down the most important Oz characters that Baum didn't give title novels to, and fills in those gaps. Relatively early in her tenure, we got The Cowardly Lion of Oz, then Hungry Tiger. Now we get Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, I kind of suspect because Thompson had to reread Marvelous Land in order to write Giant Horse. It probably stuck out to her that not only had Jack Pumpkinhead not had a title role yet, he'd scarcely had a line of dialogue in show more the preceding twenty-one books!

Like most Oz novels, though, it's focalized through a human child, so Jack Pumpkinhead brings back Peter from Gnome King. Peter was gifted a sack of pirate gold by Ozma before he returned to America at the end of Gnome King; here he discovers that the sack is magic and it contains a magic coin. The coin is magic change, and thus gives Peter a magic change, whisking him to Jack's house in Oz. The two set off for the Emerald City, but because Jack isn't the brightest, they go the wrong way and end up in the Quadling Country where they have a series of adventures, some totally standalone, but mostly revolving around trying to stop an evil baron from capturing the Emerald City.

I enjoyed it, and I think my four-year-old son did too. It recaptures for me what is the essential Oz formula: a group of unusual people who become friends and solve problems together as they cross through an unusual landscape. Peter and Jack are joined by Snif the Iffin (he was a griffin, but he cannot growl anymore and thus has lost his gr) and Baron Belfaygor, whose attempt to grow a beard before his wedding resulted in a fast-growing beard that just will not stop. The four have to work together to stop Baron Mogodore of Baffleburg from kidnapping Belfaygor's fiancée, Princess Shirley Sunshine, and attacking the Emerald City. There's a lot of creative problem solving, mostly revolving around various ways to make use of Belfaygor's beard, as well as a magic dinner bell the characters acquire during their travels. I don't think it will set your world alight, but it does exactly what an Oz novel ought to: good jokes and fun characters and suitable fantasy perils.

Jack even gets a nice, clever hero moment. This is something Oz authors don't always do for their title characters; the Scarecrow contributes nothing to the resolution of Scarecrow of Oz, for example! But as we near the climax, Peter, Belfaygor, and Snif are all taken out of commission, so it's Jack on his own who is responsible for saving Oz, with a characteristic clever piece of Thompson wordplay.

(The problem with Oz books is that it is pretty hard to justify why Oz needs saving when it is ruled by a fairy princess surrounded by magical advisors, and the explanation in this one is pretty contrived, but to be honest I was entertained, so that's fine. The Emerald City is captured because Ozma and her friends happen to be playing blind man's bluff at the exact moment Mogodore and his army arrive!)

A couple other thoughts:

• Perhaps the various barons in the Valley of the Barons are some of the people Grampa fought against in his 980 battles (as per Grampa in Oz).
• Based on what Baron Mogodore gets up to here, one feels that maybe Glinda should be reading her Great Book of Records more often to find out what crimes her subjects are committing.
  
• It's a very male adventuring party. It's not the first Oz book where all the adventurers are male (or at least male-coded): see Marvelous Land and Cowardly Lion for other examples. But this group stuck out to me more than those, I guess because Peter is very much a boy's boy, loving sports and adventures, which isn't true of, say, Button-Bright or Ojo. On top of that, Belfaygor is questing to rescue a princess help captive in a tower. Surely a most masculine pursuit!
• We read this in October, which was very seasonally appropriate: not only is it about a jack o'lantern, but Peter and Jack meet Snif in Scare City, which comes across as a haunted house.
• This book is the first appearance of Jinnicky the Red Djinn, who is a pretty minor character here, but will go on to appear in a number of Thompson's novels.

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