The Royal Book of Oz

This is the first Oz book written by someone who wasn't L. Frank Baum (don't believe the cover and title page, they lie). It's not terrible, but it's not very good, either. The Scarecrow goes off to find his family tree and ends up in an underground kingdom of racist caricatures-- even leaving aside the racist caricatures, it's not very interesting. Like, one would hope for the Scarecrow to do some clever stuff and grapple with the ruling of a country (and maybe Thompson could even remember that the Scarecrow has previously been a ruler), but mostly he just whines a lot and the story goes in circles.

Meanwhile, Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion go looking for him and end up in some weird places and meet some weird characters: I liked Sir show more Hokus of Pokes, the Arthurian knight who wandered into Oz, in particular. As a sort of outcast, he's the kind of character who paradoxically fits right into the the Oz novels.

added September 2022:
I read this aloud to my three-year-old son, our first Oz novel by Ruth Plumly Thompson after reading all of Baum's. She would go on to write eighteen more canonical Oz novels, plus two "quasi-canonical" ones, so she actually wrote more about Oz than Baum. I read all (or at least most?) of hers as a kid, but only once in most cases; this one I actually reread a few years ago (see above), so it's the only Thompson novel I have real concrete memories of.

So how is it when a new author takes over? Actually, the first chapter gives a very strong impression. It opens with the Woggle-Bug interrupting a party at Ozma's palace in the Emerald City, which gives Thompson an excuse to assemble many of the characters, and you can tell she's done her homework, as this chapter mentions many small details about each of the characters—details that in some cases Baum himself hadn't mentioned for a long time, and I rather suspect he had forgotten! The Woggle-Bug has often been mentioned in Baum's books, but I think this is the first one he actually had dialogue in since his introduction in Marvelous Land, and I found I had forgotten my voice for him. Thompson clearly read the entire series in preparation for taking over. (Or reread? Thompson was born in 1891, meaning she would have been just nine when Wonderful Wizard came out, right in the target age group.) Then, when the Scarecrow travels to the Munchkin Country to visit the beanpole Dorothy plucked him off, you can tell from the details Thompson mentions that she was working with the Tik-Tok end paper maps.

Like some of Baum's later books, Thompson's novel has two distinct plots in parallel. The first is about the Scarecrow's attempt to discover if he has a family tree: he slides down that beanpole to the subterranean kingdom of the Silver Islands, whose inhabitants tell him he is the reincarnation of their lost emperor.

It is astonishingly racist. Baum was sometimes inspired by real ethnic groups when creating Oz tribes, but it's textual here: the Scarecrow recognizes the Silver Islanders as looking Chinese because he's read about them in one of Dorothy's books. They are described as ugly, they all act awful, the illustrations are racial caricatures. In reading it aloud to my three-year-old son, I removed all explicit references to the Chinese, and tried to tone down some of the other rhetoric, making them into just another make-believe fairyland people. I always edit the books mildly on the fly—often for vocabulary, sometimes for continuity—but here I found myself for the first time just skipping an entire two-page section where the Scarecrow enumerated what was so disgusting about Silver Islander food. Like, he doesn't even eat, why would he care about this? I didn't remember it being so bad, but of course when you are reading aloud, you are forced to confront every single word of the text in a way that might not be true otherwise, where you can skim about. The plotline isn't particularly entertaining otherwise; I think my son had trouble following the reincarnation stuff and the political stuff. The Scarecrow doesn't do any interesting adventuring; he just complains about being emperor a lot.

This is a shame, because the other plot line is really successful in being Ozzy. Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion go to look for the Scarecrow, but thinking he went to his home in the Winkie Country, end up getting lost there. They encounter the city of Pokes, home to the Slow Pokes, where everyone moves so slowly they fall asleep all the time, and where an English knight, Sir Hokus, has been held captive since Arthur's time. Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, and Sir Hokus move from adventure to adventure, and they make a great trio.

Thompson has a good handle on Dorothy's mix of boldness and common sense. Rereading the series, I've had the feeling that Baum didn't really like the Cowardly Lion as much as the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, because he barely used him after the first book, unlike the others. Here, the Cowardly Lion has more to do than in the preceding thirteen novels combined, and Thompson gets his characterization note perfect. I really enjoyed Sir Hokus, the pompous, ineffectual knight who comes through when it matters. He's a fun character to read aloud, and his interplay with the Cowardly Lion is especially great. I think the trio's escape from Pokes—where they must keep singing because it's the only thing that stops the Pokes from putting them to sleep—is magnificently written stuff. This whole sideplot is really well done stuff, exactly what I want out of an Oz book... so it's a shame about the rest of it!

It's interesting to note what's different about Thompson as a writer. There are more asides to the reader, acknowledgements that you're reading a book, but like Baum occasionally did, she keeps up the fiction that she's merely reporting something that actually happened; she occasionally says things like, "Dorothy later told Ozma....", implying Ozma related the book's events to her. Suddenly both the Woggle-Bug and the Scarecrow have manservants too. Baum always liked puns, but here they come thick and fast... but for the first time, I think my son recognized one! When Sir Hokus joins Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, this is how things go:

Dropping on his knees before the little girl, Sir Hokus took her hand. "Let me go with you on this Quest for the valiant Scarecrow. Let me be your good Knight!" he begged eagerly.
     "Good night," coughed the Cowardly Lion, who, to tell the truth, was feeling a bit jealous.

When I read that bit, my son was like, "!?," clearly recognizing that something was up, but not exactly what, and I explained as best I could, how there were two kinds of "(k)night." He'd better get used to the puns!

I pulled out a map of Oz to let us trace the Scarecrow's journey, and this inspired him to make another map. In this case, he forced my wife to draw this map, which I think turned out pretty good! show less

This is the first Oz book I have read since I was a child. I wouldn't call myself a fan, but by the end I could see the appeal of these books. It was so happy and optimistic with such simple and yet magical adventures. And the Librivox narrator was simply amazing.

Another one written posthumously, based on Baum’s notes, but definitely not as good as the author’s work.

Upon his return to the cornfield from which Dorothy first rescued him, the Scarecrow decides to follow his pole deep down into the earth and find out more about his family history. But when he discovers the Silver Islands and unearths his royal heritage, will he stay beneath the earth or can Dorothy persuade him to return to the Land of Oz?