Rereading: OZMA OF OZ by L. Frank Baum

Cover and many illustrations in color by John R. Neill

The third book in Baum’s Oz series has much to recommend it. For those who have seen Disney’s “Return to Oz,” there are familiar elements and characters like The Wheelers and Tiktok the mechanical man.

Dorothy and her Uncle Henry are at sea en route to Australia to visit family when a massive storm batters the sailing ship they’re passengers on. Dorothy gets swept overboard clinging to a chicken coop, and when the storm is over, she meets Billina, the yellow hen. Billina finds she can talk, and Dorothy realizes she has somehow come to a fairyland like Oz, but when they reach shore, it turns out to be the country of Ev, and Dorothy and Billina are attacked by Wheelers, strange people with wheels for feet and hands. They escape into a cave, where they find a mechanical man long wound down and stuck. Dorothy winds him up, and Tiktok introduces himself, and declares Dorothy his new master, since she has restored his movement. Tiktok protects Dorothy and Billina from the Wheelers, and they go to the royal palace of Ev, which is nearly empty because the king is dead, and the queen and her children have been imprisoned by the Nome King, whose underground kingdom is at the edge of Ev. Princess Langwidere rules reluctantly instead, and locks Dorothy away in a tower.

Things look up when Ozma, ruler of Oz, arrives with her friends and a small army across the Deadly Desert using a magic carpet to cross the poisonous sand. Dorothy is delighted to be reunited with the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion. Dorothy and her companions are soon rescued by Ozma, who has come to try to free the missing royal family from the Nome King. That will prove a dangerous and difficult task.

This book gets bogged down a bit in the Nome King’s underground palace as each of the characters must try to guess what the Ev family has been turned into, and I think Baum made the solution too easy to guess in advance. Despite that, it’s an imaginative and entertaining read. My copy, an early printing from 1910, has page after page of wonderful color art by Neill, clearly a very expensive book to create, and the art is excellent. Recommended.

Ozma of Oz by L Frank Baum

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