(Book Review--Land of Oz, Classics, Fantasy, Children's Books)
(Read from The Complete Stories of Oz)
Started: October 25, 2021
Finished: November 4, 2021
(This review is written using my new format for book reviews.)
This is the 3rd book in the Land of Oz series. For my previous reviews, see The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz.
My History With This Book
When talking about The Marvelous Land of Oz, I mentioned my history with the Disney movie Return to Oz. But Return to Oz actually draws from both Ozma of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz. So many of the characters in this book, and much of the plot, I was already familiar with because of Return to Oz.
Also, I read this book 5 years ago when I first attempted to work my way through The Complete Stories of Oz (as I mentioned HERE and HERE.)
Summary of the Book (*SPOILERS*)
This is the first sequel to feature Dorothy again. (Dorothy was absent from the second book, The Marvelous Land of Oz.) Dorothy gets washed overboard from a ship while crossing the ocean with her Uncle Henry.
A rough life Dorothy has, huh? First she gets picked up by a cyclone, and now she gets swept off to sea? While, I guess we have to keep inventing ways for Dorothy to keep getting carried off to the Land of Oz.
Dorothy actually lands up in the Land of Ev (not Oz). Ev is next to Oz, but the two lands are separated by a great desert.
But then, Dorothy's friends from Oz arrive at that exact moment, and everyone is reunited.
The friends from Oz journey into the Nome King's kingdom to free the princes and princesses of Ev, who have been imprisoned by the Nome King.
At the end, Ozma gets a magic belt that she can transport Dorothy to Oz with anytime. So that plot point is now fixed for future books. No more having Dorothy arrive in the Land of Oz by surviving a natural disaster every time.
Evaluation
Much the same as its predecessors.
It's not a particularly logical story--coincidence and contrivance drive the plot, and the story is filled with things that don't make logical sense, or magical powers that are not clearly defined. But at this point in the series, surely the reader knows to expect this by now.
Like all the Land of Oz stories, this is "Go on a journey and meet unusual things" type story, and the appeal is in the imaginative creatures and places that L. Frank Baum creates. And it's also interesting to see how the Oz series and characters are developing.
External Links
As with the other books in this series, I'm relying on the Wikipedia page for background.
Wikipedia notes that this book "was the first in which Baum was clearly intending a series of Oz books." I suppose the evidence for this is that it's very clearly set-up at the end of the book that Dorothy now has a way to return to Oz anytime she wishes. That ending was obviously written by a man who had sequels in mind.
Wikipedia also notes: "It is the first Oz book where the majority of the action takes place outside of the Land of Oz. Only the final two chapters take place in Oz itself. This reflects a subtle change in theme: in the first book, Oz is the dangerous land through which Dorothy must win her way back to Kansas; in the third, Oz is the end and aim of the book." If memory serves, this is definitely true for the next couple books at least. Oz is now the safe place, and the threats come from outside Oz.
Also, once again I found Mari Ness's review at Tor.com to be helpful: Following Your Inner Chicken: Ozma of Oz
Mari Ness makes the point that the shift in focus to lands outside of Oz was necessitated by the fact that everyone in Oz has already gotten their happy ending. "What do you do when you need to write yet another book about a magical fairyland where everyone has already gotten a happy ending? Take your characters to another country, of course."
Mari Ness is also very critical of Ozma's first outing as Queen of Oz, noting that Ozma blunders her way through everything. (It's a good point. Something that I didn't pick up on when I read it the first time, because L. Frank Baum seems to be intending to frame Ozma as a good ruler. But as Mari Ness points out, Ozma's actual track record in this book is just one blunder after another.)
Also, if you have time, the comment thread at the bottom of the review gets into some interesting discussion about various issues--the inconsistencies in this series, and how a modern publisher would react to them, and speculation about whether some of the themes in this book were influenced by the Civil War.
Also, over on Booktube, I'm doing this series as a Buddy Read with Dane Reads. His review here:
Odds and Ends
* Inconsistencies: Dorothy, who spoke perfectly normal English in the first book, now in this book suddenly acquires some sort of "little girl" dialect where she leaves out some of the syllables in big words.
Also, Billina the chicken suddenly acquires the power of speech once Dorothy and Billina arrive in the fairy lands of Ev and Oz. The reason is because once an animal enters the fairy lands, they automatically can talk. But this was not true of Toto in the first book. (If memory serves, in one of the next books this Toto inconsistency will be addressed in the narrative.)
* Each Oz book seems to follow a formula--go on a journey and meet strange new things.
The other part of the formula is that each Oz book has to introduce new wacky side characters to go along on that journey. In this book, the new wacky side characters are The Hungry Tiger, Billina the Chicken, and Tik-Tok the machine man.
As each book introduces more and more wacky side characters, the cast of characters in the Oz books gets bigger and bigger, and L. Frank Baum can't fit them all into each book. But, he doesn't want the reader to forget about the old characters entirely either, so a number of the books in this series have a chapter at the end where all the old characters pop in briefly to make a cameo and say hi. Ozma of Oz is the first to have such an ending, where the Woogle-Bug, Jack Pumpkinhead, Jellia Jamb, Jinjur all pop in for a quick cameo before the book ends.
* And speaking of Tik-Tok, he is, according to Wikipedia, one of the first robots in literature. Although he's never called a robot. Instead he's called things like "machine man" because the word "robot" didn't come into the language until the 1920s.
Extended Quotation
She tramped across the sand, skirting the foot of one of the little rocky hills that stood near, and soon reached the edge of the forest.
At first she was greatly disappointed, because the nearer trees were all punita, or cotton-wood or eucalyptus, and bore no fruit or nuts at all. But, bye and bye, when she was almost in despair, the little girl came upon two trees that promised to furnish her with plenty of food.
One was quite full of square paper boxes, which grew in clusters on all the limbs, and upon the biggest and ripest boxes the word "Lunch" could be read, in neat raised letters. This tree seemed to bear all the year around, for there were lunch-box blossoms on some of the branches, and on others tiny little lunch-boxes that were as yet quite green, and evidently not fit to eat until they had grown bigger.
The leaves of this tree were all paper napkins, and it presented a very pleasing appearance to the hungry little girl.
But the tree next to the lunch-box tree was even more wonderful, for it bore quantities of tin dinner-pails, which were so full and heavy that the stout branches bent underneath their weight. Some were small and dark-brown in color; those larger were of a dull tin color; but the really ripe ones were pails of bright tin that shone and glistened beautifully in the rays of sunshine that touched them.
Dorothy was delighted, and even the yellow hen acknowledged that she was surprised.
The little girl stood on tip-toe and picked one of the nicest and biggest lunch-boxes, and then she sat down upon the ground and eagerly opened it. Inside she found, nicely wrapped in white papers, a ham sandwich, a piece of sponge-cake, a pickle, a slice of new cheese and an apple. Each thing had a separate stem, and so had to be picked off the side of the box; but Dorothy found them all to be delicious, and she ate every bit of luncheon in the box before she had finished.
"A lunch isn't zactly breakfast," she said to Billina, who sat beside her curiously watching. "But when one is hungry one can eat even supper in the morning, and not complain."
"I hope your lunch-box was perfectly ripe," observed the yellow hen, in a anxious tone. "So much sickness is caused by eating green things."
"Oh, I'm sure it was ripe," declared Dorothy, "all, that is, 'cept the pickle, and a pickle just has to be green, Billina. But everything tasted perfectly splendid, and I'd rather have it than a church picnic. And now I think I'll pick a dinner-pail, to have when I get hungry again, and then we'll start out and 'splore the country, and see where we are."
"Haven't you any idea what country this is?" inquired Billina.
"None at all. But listen: I'm quite sure it's a fairy country, or such things as lunch-boxes and dinner-pails wouldn't be growing upon trees. Besides, Billina, being a hen, you wouldn't be able to talk in any civ'lized country, like Kansas, where no fairies live at all."
"Perhaps we're in the Land of Oz," said the hen, thoughtfully. (End Quotation. From Chapter 3).
I like this part because the idea of having lunch boxes grow on trees is really silly and stupid, but it's kind of so silly and stupid that it's kind of fun. And that's the tone of a lot of the Land of Oz series.
Also, notice Dorothy's dialect. As I mentioned above, this is quite different from how she talked in the first book.
6 out of 10 stars. A plot that doesn't make any sense, but a pleasant book to read nonetheless.
Video Review (Playlist HERE)
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