In 3rd grade, my teacher read us one of the Oz books, though oddly enough she chose one of the later books written by Ruth Plumly Thompson rather than L. Frank Baum, the series originator.
I had already read the first three books by that point and this pretty much superfired me to plow through the rest of Baum’s Oz books, which were at that point available pretty readily in book stores. My folks signalled to family members that these would be good gifts, so they rolled into the house just about at pace for me to read them all and then re-read them. At some point, most of the ones I owned as a child didn’t make it through my parents’ later moves after I went to college, but I saved a couple of the hardbacks with the John R. Neill covers, and I’ve picked up a few paperbacks of the others here and there when I spot them in used book stores.
I was tormented after I finished the Baum books by the existence of so many later sequels by other writers until I got my hands on two in a library (Thompson’s The Lost King of Oz and The Gnome King of Oz) and realized they were kind of rubbish compared to the Baum books. As a fourth grader, I didn’t really have the conceptual vocabulary to explain why Thompson’s books weren’t as good, despite the fact that The Lost King in particular filled in a lot of the backstory of Baum’s books. For that matter, I had a hard time explaining to myself why some of Baum’s books were much more to my liking than others.
What I think was going on in my head that is now plain as day to me on reading is that Baum’s language really mattered to me in ways I couldn’t identify. I’m at least somewhat aware of a huge body of scholarly and amateur writing about the Oz books that has, among other things, identified allegorical and referential elements of the books, and some of those are visible to me now. The language was what was a delight (and sometimes a bit uh-oh-that’s-a-big-problem) to me as an adult reader. Baum’s references to the world around him weren’t just sustained allegories but also a constant flow of whimsy and satire and topsy-turvy weirdness that had sly jokes and nudges hidden inside plot episodes, characters, dialogue and so on. Thompson and later Oz writers just couldn’t match the tone and feel of Baum’s writing and so their whimsy felt curdled and second-order. It’s kind of like reading Uderzo’s version of Asterix after Rene Goscinny died—he just couldn’t get the words right.
The other thing I can see plainly is that what I was most responsive to as a kid was to world-building and to plot. Not so much that I liked Thompson’s attempts to build out Oz further, but a lot. I sort of read the Oz books the way that kids after me played Pokemon, or the way I also learned dinosaurs—as an exercise in taxonomic mastery, as building a concordance of the characters and locations. I ate up every new character as they appeared, remembered the places, updated my understanding of how Oz and its surrounding fairylands worked.
That could be tricky at times: Baum’s whimsy also meant that there were some really weird aspects to Oz that didn’t bear thinking about. For one, it really wasn’t much like a country or a kingdom in the sense that it was chock-full of small communities that didn’t know they were in Oz, didn’t know there was a ruler named Ozma, and pretty much didn’t care. Glinda the Good and Ozma together had magic that would let them track any threat to the kingdom (the Book of Records and the Magic Picture) but they weren’t terribly diligent about using them most of the time. People in Oz never died but they didn’t act very much like immortals, though they also didn’t seem to have children all that frequently either (fortunately). It seemed that they didn’t age, so that might explain it, but there are children from time to time in the series. Animals in Oz can all talk but it takes a long time before Toto speaks—and humans in Oz do seem to eat meat, which makes the whole animals-all-talk thing a bit awkward.
Anyway, most of these thoughts have preoccupied Oz fandom for a long while—I was definitely not alone in my elementary school efforts to puzzle it all out. (Sooner or later, I’ll do a re-read of The Tin Woodman of Oz, one of the nastiest books in the series and one that really raises some questions about the worldbuilding.) How about plot, though? What sorted the Baum books I liked most from the ones that I wasn’t so wild about? Essentially, if there was a coherent story with a meaningful adversary who posed real dangers to Oz or the protagonists, I loved it. If it was a kind of picaresque where folks were just wandering around, more or less, I tended to dislike it. My least favorite Oz book, for example, was The Road to Oz, which is just Dorothy and a few other folks trying to get to Oz in time for Ozma’s birthday.
This explains why The Lost Princess of Oz was my favorite, however. A short while after the book opens, the rather complacent cast of characters who hang around the Emerald City in the court of Ozma begin to realize that something’s wrong. Nobody’s seen Ozma and she can’t be found anywhere in her palace. When they go to look in the Magic Picture, it’s gone. When they go to get the Wizard’s magical tools (the Wizard eventually returns to Oz and learns some real magic), they’re gone. When they go to visit Glinda and consult the Book of Records, the Book is gone. All the important magic owned by the powers-that-be in Oz has vanished along with Ozma.
So basically the entire cast of loyal Ozite characters (by this time in the series, a small army) forms up into squads and decides to head out in the far reaches of the kingdom, where they know lots of small communities that aren’t in touch with the capital reside. (Oz sometimes seems a bit like the Tardis, bigger on the inside than the map would suggest.) I can remember wondering why they don’t consider the possibility that they’ve been attacked by one of the fairylands beyond the Deadly Desert, but I get why they stick to the local possibilities first.
The reader ends up following the party led by the Wizard and Dorothy, who head out into the northern part of Oz. After a few adventures, they find themselves on the trail of a former shoemaker named Ugu who has apparently become a powerful sorcerer, and they are joined by some allies who are also seeking their stolen magic.
Ugu is about the only competent, genuinely dangerous adversary that the Oz characters ever face. (The Nome King is a recurrent enemy who varies a lot in his threat level, though once or twice he comes up with a genuinely menacing plan to destroy or conquer Oz.) He’s the one who stole the magic and kidnapped Ozma, though the kidnapping part was kind of an accident.
Dorothy’s group goes off to fight Ugu and on the face of it, he should pretty much wipe them out. Some of the magic he uses to try and keep them out of his castle gets countered by the Wizard, who knows enough about the spells being used to counteract them, but once they get inside, Ugu turns a domed room upside down and traps them all in the dome, unable to climb out. He makes the typical villain mistake of leaving them in the trap while he goes off to gloat for a while and do some evil scheming, but you can’t really blame him—the Oz characters typically seem so full of innocent whimsy that it feels like a wonder that they don’t accidentally set themselves on fire when they camp or fall off a cliff because nobody was paying attention.
Dorothy pretty much cements her reputation as the only person in Oz with actual common sense and determination in the final showdown, because she’s brought along the only remaining magical artifact controlled by the good guys, which is the Nome King’s Magic Belt, taken by Dorothy as her weregild from the Nomes after a previous adventure. It happens to be absurdly powerful, effectively capable of accomplishing anything she can think of. Ugu didn’t grab it because the catalogue of Oz’s magical treasures that he found that led him to his thefts didn’t include an artifact from outside of Oz. I always thought that was a bit of a cheat—the Book of Records, which Ugu has, should have told him that Dorothy had the Belt and that he needed to neutralize her threat directly. But ok, after a bit of a battle in which Dorothy turns Ugu into a dove and he manages to fight the spell enough to become a giant Dovezilla, Ugu is defeated.
Dorothy’s war party is a bit puzzled, though—they can’t find Ozma anywhere and the various magics they have say she’s with them but show nothing but a pitch-black space. (Though once again nobody reads back in the Book of Records to get the full skinny on what happened to Ozma—the failure to use a magical book which records all events and that is self-indexing and searchable used to drive me nuts when I was a kid, but of course, it would always end the story before it started if they did.) Anyway, they eventually find out that Ugu enchanted Ozma into a golden peach-pit and that one of the Oz characters ate the peach (um, yeah) and has had the golden pit in his pocket ever since. They pry the pit open and there she is. Everybody goes home, happy ending.
Ugu as a dove runs into the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman and professes that he’s absolutely fine as a dove and regrets his wicked ways, which also disappointed me—I wanted this guy back for a return engagement. I actually found myself sort of rooting for Ugu because late in the series, Ozma and her friends get pretty damn insufferable, especially when they go all over Oz each year raiding the country for increasingly elaborate presents for Ozma’s birthday.
I can readily understand why the book was my childhood favorite, though. A real enemy, real stakes, but there’s also a kind of Justice League feeling to all the characters breaking into teams and setting out for adventure. It actually feels like the Oz protagonists could lose and that was a very rare circumstance in the series—there’s one other serious attempt to conquer Oz, and maybe two other cases where the heroes are in genuine danger.