With The Magic of Oz we approach the end of the original series, as this is the thirteenth and penultimate book in the novels by Baum himself. Young Kiki Aru, a boy of the Hyup people who live atop Mount Munch, is a bored and indolent sort of boy, the kind who seems always unwilling to be part of the community around him. One day, however, he discovers the only magical secret his father, Bini Aru, had preserved from the days that Bini Aru was a great Sorcerer: the magical word "Pyrzqxgl", complete with instructions on how to pronounce this [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: The Tin Woodman of Oz
June 18, 2015 By Leave a Comment
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 Patchwork Girl of Oz
June 2, 2015 By Leave a Comment
After The Emerald City of Oz, Baum originally intended to end the series. But both his tendency to spend money, and insistent legions of fans, showed this to be as futile an attempt as that of Conan Doyle to kill off Sherlock Holmes. As he had deliberately had Oz sealed away from contact with the outside world, Baum showed one of his whimsical attempts at maintaining consistency in the introduction of The Patchwork Girl of Oz, stating that he had managed to establish a wireless (radio) link with Oz (with the Wizard and Shaggy Man [ Continue reading... ]
On My Shelves: The Emerald City of Oz
May 28, 2015 By Leave a Comment
The sixth book in the series is a pivotal story in more than one way. In The Emerald City of Oz, Dorothy learns that rebuilding the house in Kansas following the twister, and then taking the rest-cure trip to Australia, put Uncle Henry in considerable debt. He had hoped to be able to pay that debt off, but crops have not been good and his health has not fully recovered. While Henry doesn't worry much for himself, he does about Em and of course both of them are very worried for the often inexplicably cheerful Dorothy. They want her [ 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... ]
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