Dot and Tot of Merryland

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. 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 show more 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

There is, I think, a reason why this "novel" - L. Frank Baum's first after the seminal Wonderful Wizard of Oz - has rarely been reprinted. Simply put, it isn't very good. The protagonists are unlikeable, and they don't really do anything; they just glide through the story, bouncing from one magical island to another, commenting and moving on. Similarly, there's only the barest semblance of a plot: if the Oz books are episodic, this one's basically a series of vignettes strung together. Some of them, like the visit to the land of babies, are rather sweet and charming; others, like the land of "pussy cats," fade almost immediately into insignificance. There's even a slight undercurrent of horror in the middle chapters, focusing on the show more start-stop lives of an island of dolls and toys controlled by a "thinking machine," but Baum never explores the possibilities - he just lets them sit there, vaguely unsettling.

It's not a terrible book, but there's really nothing about it to appeal to anyone who isn't a dedicated Baum fan or scholar. Indeed, the most interesting aspect of it is probably the illustration and design of W.W. Denslow, which can only now be found preserved in online editions. More than nearly any other of Baum's fantasy works, Dot and Tot deserves to drift into obscurity. There are literally dozens of better works to have come from his pen. show less

Written after the success of The Wizard of Oz and yuo can see allthe touches but just not as good a story. The Gutenberg version has the illustrations but some seem to be recycled from other stories. Still, a fun and light listen/read.