Woot the Wanderer is, as his name says, a wanderer of Oz, originally from the Gillikin country, who arrives in his travels at the Palace of the Tin Woodman. That worthy, always interested in newcomers, has Woot brought in and asks him to tell of himself and his travels. But after this, as Woot is enjoying a dinner (which, naturally, neither the Tin Woodman nor his current companion, the Scarecrow, partake of), Woot asks how the Woodman came to be made of tin. The Woodman recounts the story – how he came to love a Munchkin [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: The Lost Princess of Oz
June 16, 2015 By Leave a Comment
Eleventh in the series, The Lost Princess of Oz follows up on Rinkitink in Oz with another excellent tale, one of the best in the canon, and one of those most deeply influential in my writing of Polychrome. Dorothy Gale, going to Ozma's rooms to ask if she and her friends Betsy and Trot could take the Saw-Horse and royal carriage to visit the Munchkin country, discovers that Ozma has disappeared; even more disturbing, her Magic Picture is gone, so they cannot use it to discover where Ozma is. Shortly, they learn that Glinda's [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: Rinkitink in Oz
June 11, 2015 By Leave a Comment
With the tenth book of the Oz series, we reach one of the most important books to my writing of Polychrome, and also one of my favorite books in the series. Thus, rather than a mere On My Shelves, this book gets an Under the Influence all to itself It is worth noting that. Rinkitink began existence as another of Baum's non-Oz fantasies, but Baum repurposed it as an Oz novel and that is how it has become known. On the idyllic tropical island of Pingaree in the Nonestic Ocean (the ocean that surrounds the lands of Faerie) [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: The Scarecrow of Oz
June 9, 2015 By Leave a Comment
Baum wrote many other stories, although none of them reached the popularity of the Oz novels. He wrote two books, titled The Sea Fairies and Sky Island, featuring a diminuitive girl nicknamed Trot and her guardian, the old seaman called Cap'n Bill, as the two went on strange faerie adventures under water and into the sky. In the second volume, the pair encounter two familiar faces from the Oz novels, the eternal lost boy Button-Bright (who is slightly older, and considerably less stupid, than he was in his appearance in The Road to [ Continue reading... ]
Tik-Tok of Oz
June 4, 2015 By Leave a Comment
This, the eighth of the Oz novels, takes us into the second half of the fourteen Oz books that Baum wrote, and also is the first book to prominently feature characters or menaces from "isolated, little-known" areas of Oz, something which Baum himself made something of a necessity by his more general pronouncement of how Ozma had made Oz a near-paradise. Queen Ann Soforth of the tiny, isolated sliver of a Kingdom called Oogaboo is weary of being a sort of play-Queen ruling over the same eighteen men, twenty-seven women, and forty-four [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: The Road to Oz
May 22, 2015 By Leave a Comment
The Road to Oz begins, as did the others except The Marvelous Land of Oz, in the "outside world", this time back in Kansas on Dorothy's farm. A strange, shaggy man comes wandering through, picking apples and putting them in his pocket – and when a certain black dog challenges him, he picks up the dog and puts him in the shaggy pockets, too. The Shaggy Man encounters Dorothy and asks if she would show him the road to Butterfield; she agrees and takes him to the intersection, and is then surprised when he begins to move off down a different [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
May 11, 2015 By Leave a Comment
By this point in the series, the Oz books had developed into the Harry Potter of their day. Writing an Oz novel was an assured way to mint money for L. Frank Baum, and for many years he availed himself of that mint whenever he found himself short of funds, as he invariably did since he was a terrible businessman with a fondness for putting on expensive theatrical productions. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz is the fourth entry in the series, and the title alone shows how Baum was making sure to pay attention to his fans. Dorothy was popular, [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Ozma of Oz
May 6, 2015 By Leave a Comment
The third book of the Oz series by L. Frank Baum sees the return of arguably the most popular character in the land – Dorothy Gale. In Ozma of Oz, her Uncle Henry has become ill and is advised by his doctor to take a trip to Australia for a sea and country cure. This was not uncommon in the era in which Baum was writing – various forms of "sea air", "desert air", etc., cures were recommended for exhaustion and for illnesses, especially tuberculosis or "consumption" as they called it. While onboard, a powerful storm strikes the [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: Harry Potter
March 23, 2015 By Leave a Comment
Looking back over my prior posts, I find myself startled to discover that I have not yet discussed the single most successful and perhaps influential fantasy series written since I was born: Harry Potter, by J. K. Rowling. The vast majority, if not all, of the people reading my columns will know the story of Harry, but just in case: the basic concept of the series is that Harry Potter was left as an orphan with his only relatives, the Dursleys, and raised (poorly) by them for eleven years; at that point he discovers [ Continue reading... ]
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