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Glinda of Oz (Oz #14)

by L. Frank Baum

3.92 · rating details · 1,594 ratings · 34 reviews

Peace, prosperity, and happiness are the rule in the marvelous Land of Oz, but in a faraway corner of this magical domain dwell two tribes--the Flatheads and the Skeezers--who have declared war on each other. Determined to keep her subjects from fighting, the Ruler of Oz, Princess Ozma, along with her dearest friend, Princess Dorothy Gale (formerly of Kansas), embarks on a...more

Hardcover, 304 pages

Published May 31st 2000 by HarperCollins (first published 1920)

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Oct 13, 2010

Lesley rated it

Shelves: underappreciated, princesses-that-rock, kids-under-12ish

One of the travesties of the 1939 Wizard of Oz film and the play Wicked is that they created an image of Glinda the Good Witch as a fluffy headed, bubble traveling giggler. Nothing could be further from her character in the original Oz books, in which she is a wise and powerful sorceress, charged with protecting the people of Oz and their princess Ozma. In this, the last book in the series, Dorothy accidentally discovers a war brewing between 2 tribes in a remote part of the land. Ozma, dedicat...more

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Jun 27, 2011

Joshua Gross rated it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jul 07, 2011

Atman88 rated it

Glinda of Oz is about a war between the skeezers and the flatheads, two peoples that the land of Oz knows little about because they are isolated. The flatheads have flat heads with brains at their side in cans that can be stolen, given away, or lost. The final moral/ark is that Glinda decides the flatheads need more then peace to be happy, they have to have 'normal' heads with brains under their skulls like everyone else... She makes them 'normal and pretty' and then tells them they must be rena...more

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Apr 12, 2011

Thomas rated it

Shelves: books-i-read-by-myself

IT WAS STUPENDOUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!...more

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Jan 05, 2012

Danns rated it

And 14 marks the end of L. Frank Baum's run on Oz books. What a fantastic journey, so full of adventure and so fun. This final tale begins with Dorthy and Ozma traveling to the far reaches of the Giliken country to the land of the flatheads and skeezers. There a war is brewing between two societies who have never heard of Ozma's rule. To stave this war, bring peace, and tame the use of magic, Ozma and Dorthy fly to the rescue, and are summarily dismissed and captures by the wicked rules bent...more

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May 25, 2011

Krys rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: own, fantasy, classic, short-length-book, intermediate-middle-grade, witches-wizards-magic-themed, fairy-pixie-themed, third-person-narrative, read-in-2011

Well, that's the last of the Oz books... at least, the last of the L. Frank Baum ones (Ruth Plumly Thompson's are largely out of print). But it also knocks a blue book off of my list. Squee.

(And I got hit with lots of good ARCs this week, so I need the headway.)

In the final Baum Oz book, Glinda of Oz, two regions of Oz are waging war against one another. Dorothy sets off with Ozma to stop the battles between the Skeezers and the Flatheads before they destroy one another. ...more

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Jan 24, 2010

Jason Pettus rated it

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally. This review covers all 14 of the Baum Oz books, which is why it's found on all 14 book pages here.)

I think it's fairly safe by now to assume that nearly everyone in Western society is familiar with The Wizard of Oz, most of us because of the classic 1939 movie adaptation; and many realize...more(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally. This review covers all 14 of the Baum Oz books, which is why it's found on all 14 book pages here.)

I think it's fairly safe by now to assume that nearly everyone in Western society is familiar with The Wizard of Oz, most of us because of the classic 1939 movie adaptation; and many realize as well that author L. Frank Baum ended up penning a whole series of sequels, because of the original book's astounding success back at the turn of the 20th century when it was first published -- 13 sequels altogether, before his death in 1919, which after the movie's success twenty years later became a literal merchandising empire, spawning hundreds more official sequels by various authors and hundreds more unofficial ones once the characters moved into the public domain. And like many others, I've always been interested in what these 14 "canonical" Oz books have to say; and that's why I decided this winter to sit down and read them all in a row for the first time, easy to do because of them being available for free at both Project Gutenberg and the email subscription service DailyLit (which is how I myself read them, and in fact is how I read many of the older books you see reviewed here; I'm a big fan of theirs, and highly recommend them).

But of course, to even approach these books with the right mindset, it's important to understand that like so many other one-hit-wonders, Baum was not only eluded by success in most of his other endeavors but was an active failure at them -- in the 1870s, for example, he unsuccessfully tried his hand at breeding fancy poultry (a national fad at the time), then in the 1880s opened his own theatre and became one of the first-ever Americans to produce modern-style stage musicals, apparently a little too ahead of its time, then in the 1890s moved to the Dakota Territory and opened a dry-goods store that eventually failed, as well as starting a newspaper that folded too. So it was sort of a case of random lightning in a bottle when he decided in the late 1890s to try his hand at children's literature, and ended up with his very first title being the most popular kid's book in America for two years straight, and no surprise that Baum then spent the rest of his life desperately trying to figure out how to bottle that lightning again. Because now that I've read it myself, I can confirm that the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz is astonishingly great, a sort of miraculous combination of traits that makes for an almost perfect children's story; and although most of it follows the same storyline seen in the '39 movie, there are also significant differences, making it worth your while to sit and read the book version if you have the interest. (And by the way, for some really interesting reading, check out the academic analysis that was done of this book in the 1960s, arguing that most of its details symbolically correspond almost exactly to various political and economic issues of the late 1800s, including the yellow brick road representing the much-discussed gold standard of that age, the scarecrow representing the then-hot Populist Party, Toto representing the teetotaler [prohibitionist:] movement, and a lot more.)

But of course, there are a couple of details about this book that have been forgotten over the decades too, which also help explain its record-shattering success -- it was an unusually lavish book for its time, for example, with two-toned illustrations on every page and several full-color plates, and let's also not forget that Baum himself mounted a Broadway-style musical of Oz just two years after the book was published, a huge hit which toured nationally for a decade and that was even more insanely popular than the book itself (including making national stars out of vaudeville performers Fred Stone and David Montgomery, playing the Scarecrow and Tin Man; the stage production left out the Cowardly Lion altogether, which is why he is also barely seen in any of the 13 canonical sequels). And so that's why when Baum attempted starting up other fantasy series in the wake of Oz's success, hoping to turn all of them into lucrative franchises like the original, the audience mostly responded with yawns; and that's why Baum eventually went back to writing more and more Oz books as the 20th century continued, because by now the strength of the brand far outweighed the relative writing skills of Baum when it came to any particular volume.

That's why, at least to adults, it's perhaps actually the introductions to each book that are the most fascinating thing about them; because to be frank, most of the books follow a pretty familiar formula, with a danger-filled quest involving various kooky characters that is usually finished about two-thirds of the way through, followed by a massive parade or party that lets Baum trot out the growing number of main characters added to this universe with each title. (And by the way, prepare yourself for Baum's unending love of the deus-ex-machina plot device; over half the books end along the lines of, "And then our heroes took possession of a super-duper magical device, which they waved in the air and all their troubles went away.") In fact, for those who don't know, that's why the official map of Oz and its surrounding lands eventually grew so large, because Baum still hadn't given up on his dream of having a whole series of kid-lit cash cows out there generating revenue for him, and so would use many of these Oz sequels to introduce entirely new casts of characters who live in entirely new lands, "just over the mountains" or "just past the desert" of Oz itself. By the end of the original 14 books, in fact, Baum had built up a virtual aristocracy of licensable characters, all of whom would have to be dragged out for a cameo at some point in each book to remind the audience of their existence -- not just the cast of the original book and '39 movie but also various other princesses like Ozma and Betsy Bobbin, boy characters like Ojo the Unlucky and Button Bright, adults who help them like the Shaggy Man, Cap'n Bill and Ugu the Shoemaker, and of course a whole litany of quirky fantastical sidekicks, including but not limited to Tik-Tok, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Great Jinjin, Billina the Angry Hen, Scraps the Patchwork Girl, and Polychrome the Rainbow Fairy. Whew! And so did the Great Oz Merchandising Experiment keep limping along for two decades, with each sequel selling less and less and getting lazier and lazier (for example, the tenth book in the series, 1916's Rinkitink in Oz, was actually a non-Oz book written a decade previous, published almost unchanged except for a hasty final chapter full of Oz regulars slapped onto the end); and thus did Baum's bad luck in business come back with a vengeance as well, with three more Broadway productions that were all flops, and even the establishment of a film production company in 1914 that eventually went bankrupt.

You can see the progression of all this reflected in Baum's first-person introductions to each book, which like I said is why they might be the most fascinating parts of all for adult readers -- how in the first sequel, for example, he expresses legitimately gleeful surprise and joy at how passionate his fans were, and how thousands of children had literally written to him out of the blue demanding more Oz stories, while with each subsequent sequel his tone becomes more and more snarky, ala "Well, dear and wonderful children, you've yet again demanded another Oz book like the sheep you are, so here it is, you screeching little monsters." In fact, in book six of the series, 1910's The Emerald City of Oz, Baum flat-out states that it's going to be the very last Oz book, and it's no coincidence that many fans actually consider this one to be the best of the original fourteen, because of Baum's extra attention to and enthusiasm for this particular storyline, thinking as he erroneously did that it would be the grand finale of the entire Oz universe; but after his later financial failures forced him back into the Oz business again, the gloves finally come off in his introductions, with most of the rest sounding to today's ears something like, "Well, okay, here again is the sugary teat you all apparently can't get enough of suckling, you infuriating little animals, so open wide and take your medicine." Now, of course, you shouldn't feel too bad for Baum; by the last years of his life, his combined books and plays were generating for him in today's terms roughly a quarter-million dollars a year just in personal royalties.

So all in all, an experience I'm glad I had, reading all fourteen original Oz books in a row, but not something I'd recommend to others; instead, maybe better just to read the first, then skip to the sixth, then skip straight to the 14th, 1920's Glinda of Oz, because of its unusual darkness (probably caused, many scholars agree, by Baum knowing that he was near death). As with many authors I've looked at here at CCLaP, history seems to have correctly adjusted itself in Baum's case, with most of his books now rightfully falling into the obscurity they deserve, even while his one true masterpiece is still rightfully recognized as such. (less)

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May 03, 2009

Kathryn rated it

Shelves: fantasy, childrens

This is my favorite of the Oz books, full of all kinds of magic and magical, powerful, resourceful girls and women. I first read it when I was eight years old, and read it aloud to my son when he was five or six. I was happy to find that the book enchanted me just as much as an adult as it had when I was a child.

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Feb 11, 2009

Jennifer rated it

This was the last Oz book, and always one of my favorites, and I think one that holds up well to the scrutiny of adulthood. It's chock-full of the most awesome female characters (every major person of real power is female in this book), and Baum actually makes the Oz rescuers at the end work to save Dorothy and Ozma instead of just showing up and having everyone give up before their awesomeness.

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Mar 17, 2009

Wils Cain rated it

The last of Baum's Oz books. I can't believe the experience is over. What an imagination this man had. The opening letter at the beginning of the previous 13 books was always from Baum himself explaining how he wrote the book because so many kids wrote him asking him to keep the story going. This book opens with a letter from the publisher to the children...very sad. More adventures through Oz with a real focus on the strong female characters and their powers. Great ending to the series.

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Sep 19, 2011

Richard Koshak rated it

Shelves: classics, fantasy

This is the last installment of the Oz books written by Baum. There are dozens of Oz books written by others, including the recent Wicked. I am sorry that Baum did not live to write more books because the last few book in the series showed that Baum reached a maturity in writing that was a pleasure to read.

Besides being introduced to so many wonderful characters in an environment that is relatively safe but not without cause for dramatic tension, the thing I enjoyed most about readin...more

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May 30, 2011

Deviant Geek rated it

Shelves: adventure, audio-book, children, classics, magic

i cant believe im done with the oz serious! :( i loved it so much i didnt want it to end..
u may think its a children's book but it's not.. it's for everyone who's young at heart.. a serious that is well loved and definitely recommended for ageless hearts..

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Jan 21, 2011

Sarah rated it

Fascinating to see how much was changed for the movie (and our show). A great story for children, though distanced in the way I often find books of its period to be.

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Sep 24, 2011

Hpboy13 rated it

I only wish that there were more Oz books from Baum, because he has a 14 for 14 track record.

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Oct 29, 2009

Mike rated it

Much better even than the original Wizard of Oz. i was amazed at Dorothy's real personality.

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Jun 24, 2010

Jenine rated it

I have grown so fond of these books. Spoiler: I loved at the end that the Flatheads had their brains reinstalled by Glinda and weren't flat on top any more.

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May 01, 2009

Tommyb added it

Shelves: 11-21-2007, 5-52

Fiction,Children's fiction

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Jun 19, 2010

Widsith marked it as to-read

Glinda of Oz (Oz, 14) by L. Frank Baum (2000)

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Jul 25, 2011

Samantha rated it

Cute

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Aug 11, 2011

Lady Lioness marked it as keepers · review of another edition

under bed

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Aug 13, 2011

Dianna rated it

Shelves: to-read-2011, favorites, 2011-read

One of my favorite Oz books! Dorothy and Ozma are stuck on a remote Oz island which has been submerged by the wicked Queen Coo-ee-oh. When the queen is changed into a diamond swan, all their friends from the Emerald City—headed by Glinda—come to rescue them.

Oh, and the illustrations by John R. Neill—beautiful!

· see review

Feb 28, 2011

Amyem added it · review of another edition

Shelves: own, 60-book-challenge-2011

The last and perhaps most ambitious. Ozma actually gets to be a character in this one, not just sit in the Emrald City and be adored.

I mentioned something of the plot line to fellow goodreads t1 and then had to reread. As wonderful as I remembered it.

· see review

Apr 04, 2008

The Cute Little Brown-haired girl rated it

Shelves: classics

"Are you a good witch?....or a bad witch?"

Either way, you will LOVE this!! Whether you are 6 or 156 years old, this is a classic that you cannot miss reading. Just wonderful stuff.

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Oct 23, 2008

Chandra rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: wizard-of-oz, kids-young-adult

The 14th book was last of the Oz series to be authored by Baum. The series was then taken up by Ruth Plumly Thompson. It's a decent enough book, but not one of the strongest.

· see review

Apr 19, 2008

Karen rated it

Shelves: fiction, childrens

I love the old covers to these books and the illustrations. If I took Archeology of the Book again, I would seriously consider writing about one or all of the Oz books.

· see review

Mar 10, 2010

Morgan B rated it

Shelves: fantasy

i rated glinda of a oz as a 3 because it was ok. i like glinda but the book wasnt that great. if your a fan of the wizard of oz and glinda you make like this book.

· see review

Jan 09, 2010

Alice rated it

Shelves: childhood, fantasy

I don't clearly recollect the later volumes in this series, but I know I ripped through the entire "Oz" shelf at the library.

· see review

Jun 09, 2010

Heather rated it

Shelves: kidlit, kindle, fantasy

The style is irritating. Dorothy is especially irritating. I might have liked it as a small child.

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Sep 15, 2007

Lori Anderson rated it

I collected these right before my son was born (2003) and recently read them all -- so much fun!

· see review

Jun 22, 2008

Sharon added it

Shelves: kids

I've read more of the Oz series than I can remember, so I'm missing a bunch.

· see review

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About L. Frank Baum

Lyman Frank Baum was an American author, actor, and independent filmmaker best known as the creator, along with illustrator W. W. Denslow, of one of the most popular books in American children's literature, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, better known today as simply The Wizard of Oz. He wrote thirteen sequels, nine other fantasy novels, and a plethora of other works (55 novels in total, 82 short stor...more

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