Oz Dispatch
I've read all fourteen of the "canonical" Oz books by L. Frank Baum (and the collection of short stories Little Wizard Stories of Oz). Here are my findings:
I think the books are pretty easily divided into three distinct eras:
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The Marvelous Land of Oz
Ozma of Oz
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
The Road to Oz
The Emerald City of Oz
After the original book, which was presumably written without thinking he'd be writing Oz books the rest of his life, there's the first run of books that were written despite his increasing desire to write about other characters/fantasy worlds. The author's introductions to the books grow more and more passive aggressive in the way they mention all the kids writing and demanding more stories about Oz, and the fact that he's got other stories and other worlds that he hopes to write about someday.
These six books have a reasonably consistent level of quality, with Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (the new supporting characters aren't the most interesting) or The Road to Oz (pretty low-stakes tale that climaxes with a couple of chapters about Ozma's birthday party) being my least favorites. The Marvelous Land of Oz features perhaps the most surprising development of the entire series when Tip, the boy that we've spent the entire book following, is revealed to unknowingly be the enchanted (and female) long-lost Princess Ozma. I generally enjoyed all of these books, though, and they were funnier (and punnier) than I remembered. Perhaps owing to his apparent disinterest in writing more Oz stories, it doesn't take long for the books to start taking place largely outside of the land of Oz (Ozma, Dorothy and the Wizard, and Road all take place largely outside of Oz. The Emerald City of Oz opens with an author's introduction talking about how this will be his last book about Oz and ends with *SPOILER* Glinda using magic to make Oz invisible and impossible to reach except for those that are already there.
Next comes the "forced back into writing Oz books" stories.
The Patchwork Girl of Oz
Tik-Tok of Oz
The Scarecrow of Oz
Rinkitink in Oz
This apparently happened after he'd tried to get his readers interested in the adventures of Cap'n Bill and Trot (the first of which apparently
didn't hit, so he added a couple of characters from The Road to Oz into the second one, before finally having to go back to writing official Oz books). This run isn't necessarily bad, but my energy definitely flagged while reading these books. Patchwork Girl and Scarecrow are both actually good for Oz books, and Tik-Tok and Rinkitink aren't bad but they were both re-purposed material that Baum used to fill a holiday Oz book release slot and I wasn't too engaged by them (particularly disappointing in the case of a book named after Tik-Tok!). Rinkitink started life as an unrelated original fantasy story ten years earlier and actually doesn't reach Oz, or feature Oz characters, until near the end of the book. And Tik-Tok of Oz took the circuitous route of being adapted by Baum from his own stage adaptation of Ozma of Oz.
The last run finished strong.
The Lost Princess of Oz
The Tin Woodman of Oz
The Magic of Oz
Glinda of Oz
They make better use of beloved characters from that first run of books and they all take place in Oz! The storytelling gets slightly (not too much but slightly) more complex, and he actually starts to categorize and nail down some of the background mythology and mechanics of magic. Also, The Tin Woodman of Oz ends up being exactly the kind of book I hoped for with the other ones named after characters I knew or liked (like Tik-Tok or even the Scarecrow). You learn more about his history and he's the main character of the book and motivates the action.
Other Items of Interest:
Romance - Generally doesn't exist. Any time it seems suggested, it's never really addressed, and most of the characters are either children or sexless adult creatures. There are human men in the stories (the Shaggy Man and the Wizard), but the only human (or humanish) females in the books are young girls or fairies, so they can express admiration for somebody's beauty but they don't seem moved by it in a necessarily romantic way. I found this particularly interesting when the Patchwork Girl is introduced and both the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman both talk about how beautiful she is and express what seems like it might be romantic interest, but it's ultimately such a childlike understanding of romance that there's no sense of what kind of relationship they could even imagine having. And it's not ever really addressed again. Also interesting is the way that love and romance and marriage are treated in The Tin Woodman of Oz, where he goes off in search of the Munchkin woman he was in love with before he lost his body. He reveals that the heart the Wizard gave him is something like a "tender" heart instead of a "loving" heart, and he goes off in search of her to marry her not because he loves her again, but because he worries that she's unhappy about his absence. And ultimately he discovers that she's married to something else (a weird and amusingly ghoulish creature), and this marriage is described as being preferable to her not because she loves her husband but because he reminds her of the man she used to love and because he's well-trained as a husband.
Violence - I didn't not remember this at all, and it's pretty wild. Nobody in Oz can be killed (or hurt?) which seems like definite wish-fulfillment. But then he frequently states that non Oz-folk (like Dorothy and other people or animals from America) can be hurt or killed, and the people who can't can still be CUT UP INTO PIECES AND SCATTERED WHILE STILL PERFECTLY ALIVE. He uses this as a way of introducing peril to his characters even though they're from Oz, and it just seems so much more horrifying to me. It also gives rise to some wonderful strange scenarios like the one in The Tin Woodman of Oz. In that book, it's revealed that after Nick Chopper lost all of his limbs and body parts and became the Tin Woodman, a soldier named Captain Fyter fell in love with Nimmie Amee (the Munchkin girl) and the same thing happened to him (the same tinsmith turned him into the Tin Soldier). The tinsmith in question, however, KEPT THE DISMEMBERED AND STILL LIVING BODY PARTS AND USED THEM TO ASSEMBLE A NEW PERSON NAMED CHOPFYT AND NIMMIE AMEE MARRIES IT.
Magic - As the books go on, and as he keeps having to get around the fanciful ideas he came up with in earlier books (like the Nome King's magic belt, Ozma's magic picture, Glinda's magic book of everything that happens anywhere), he began to codify the different kinds of magic in his Oz universe. So Ozma has fairy magic, Glinda has sorceress magic, the Wizard has his own variety (he learns this from Glinda in the later books, so this might be a subset of sorceress magic?), witches have their own magic, the Nomes have their own, and there's something called Yookoohoo magic. These all have their different strengths and weaknesses, things they can and cannot affect, and they have different methods (Ozma doesn't need the instruments and powders and whatever that the Wizard does, for instance). The books don't get too bogged down in it, but it does get fussier than I expected based on how light and fluffy and improvised so much of the feeling of the books is. There's also a kind of origin myth for Oz mentioned in one of the last couple of books (that contradicts information about Ozma from the second or third book; the continuity of the series can be pretty secondary). There's a fairy queen named Lurline that enchanted the non-magical land of Oz and (I think) left behind a fairy princess (Ozma) to rule over them.
Toto - He can talk in Oz, just like all other animals. And he occasionally does in the later books. This must have been something the kids wrote to Baum about because I think it isn't until somewhere in that last round of books that somebody comments on Toto's silence and Dorothy says he just keeps quiet unless he's got something to say.
I think the books are pretty easily divided into three distinct eras:
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The Marvelous Land of Oz
Ozma of Oz
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
The Road to Oz
The Emerald City of Oz
After the original book, which was presumably written without thinking he'd be writing Oz books the rest of his life, there's the first run of books that were written despite his increasing desire to write about other characters/fantasy worlds. The author's introductions to the books grow more and more passive aggressive in the way they mention all the kids writing and demanding more stories about Oz, and the fact that he's got other stories and other worlds that he hopes to write about someday.
These six books have a reasonably consistent level of quality, with Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (the new supporting characters aren't the most interesting) or The Road to Oz (pretty low-stakes tale that climaxes with a couple of chapters about Ozma's birthday party) being my least favorites. The Marvelous Land of Oz features perhaps the most surprising development of the entire series when Tip, the boy that we've spent the entire book following, is revealed to unknowingly be the enchanted (and female) long-lost Princess Ozma. I generally enjoyed all of these books, though, and they were funnier (and punnier) than I remembered. Perhaps owing to his apparent disinterest in writing more Oz stories, it doesn't take long for the books to start taking place largely outside of the land of Oz (Ozma, Dorothy and the Wizard, and Road all take place largely outside of Oz. The Emerald City of Oz opens with an author's introduction talking about how this will be his last book about Oz and ends with *SPOILER* Glinda using magic to make Oz invisible and impossible to reach except for those that are already there.
Next comes the "forced back into writing Oz books" stories.
The Patchwork Girl of Oz
Tik-Tok of Oz
The Scarecrow of Oz
Rinkitink in Oz
This apparently happened after he'd tried to get his readers interested in the adventures of Cap'n Bill and Trot (the first of which apparently
didn't hit, so he added a couple of characters from The Road to Oz into the second one, before finally having to go back to writing official Oz books). This run isn't necessarily bad, but my energy definitely flagged while reading these books. Patchwork Girl and Scarecrow are both actually good for Oz books, and Tik-Tok and Rinkitink aren't bad but they were both re-purposed material that Baum used to fill a holiday Oz book release slot and I wasn't too engaged by them (particularly disappointing in the case of a book named after Tik-Tok!). Rinkitink started life as an unrelated original fantasy story ten years earlier and actually doesn't reach Oz, or feature Oz characters, until near the end of the book. And Tik-Tok of Oz took the circuitous route of being adapted by Baum from his own stage adaptation of Ozma of Oz.
The last run finished strong.
The Lost Princess of Oz
The Tin Woodman of Oz
The Magic of Oz
Glinda of Oz
They make better use of beloved characters from that first run of books and they all take place in Oz! The storytelling gets slightly (not too much but slightly) more complex, and he actually starts to categorize and nail down some of the background mythology and mechanics of magic. Also, The Tin Woodman of Oz ends up being exactly the kind of book I hoped for with the other ones named after characters I knew or liked (like Tik-Tok or even the Scarecrow). You learn more about his history and he's the main character of the book and motivates the action.
Other Items of Interest:
Romance - Generally doesn't exist. Any time it seems suggested, it's never really addressed, and most of the characters are either children or sexless adult creatures. There are human men in the stories (the Shaggy Man and the Wizard), but the only human (or humanish) females in the books are young girls or fairies, so they can express admiration for somebody's beauty but they don't seem moved by it in a necessarily romantic way. I found this particularly interesting when the Patchwork Girl is introduced and both the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman both talk about how beautiful she is and express what seems like it might be romantic interest, but it's ultimately such a childlike understanding of romance that there's no sense of what kind of relationship they could even imagine having. And it's not ever really addressed again. Also interesting is the way that love and romance and marriage are treated in The Tin Woodman of Oz, where he goes off in search of the Munchkin woman he was in love with before he lost his body. He reveals that the heart the Wizard gave him is something like a "tender" heart instead of a "loving" heart, and he goes off in search of her to marry her not because he loves her again, but because he worries that she's unhappy about his absence. And ultimately he discovers that she's married to something else (a weird and amusingly ghoulish creature), and this marriage is described as being preferable to her not because she loves her husband but because he reminds her of the man she used to love and because he's well-trained as a husband.
Violence - I didn't not remember this at all, and it's pretty wild. Nobody in Oz can be killed (or hurt?) which seems like definite wish-fulfillment. But then he frequently states that non Oz-folk (like Dorothy and other people or animals from America) can be hurt or killed, and the people who can't can still be CUT UP INTO PIECES AND SCATTERED WHILE STILL PERFECTLY ALIVE. He uses this as a way of introducing peril to his characters even though they're from Oz, and it just seems so much more horrifying to me. It also gives rise to some wonderful strange scenarios like the one in The Tin Woodman of Oz. In that book, it's revealed that after Nick Chopper lost all of his limbs and body parts and became the Tin Woodman, a soldier named Captain Fyter fell in love with Nimmie Amee (the Munchkin girl) and the same thing happened to him (the same tinsmith turned him into the Tin Soldier). The tinsmith in question, however, KEPT THE DISMEMBERED AND STILL LIVING BODY PARTS AND USED THEM TO ASSEMBLE A NEW PERSON NAMED CHOPFYT AND NIMMIE AMEE MARRIES IT.
Magic - As the books go on, and as he keeps having to get around the fanciful ideas he came up with in earlier books (like the Nome King's magic belt, Ozma's magic picture, Glinda's magic book of everything that happens anywhere), he began to codify the different kinds of magic in his Oz universe. So Ozma has fairy magic, Glinda has sorceress magic, the Wizard has his own variety (he learns this from Glinda in the later books, so this might be a subset of sorceress magic?), witches have their own magic, the Nomes have their own, and there's something called Yookoohoo magic. These all have their different strengths and weaknesses, things they can and cannot affect, and they have different methods (Ozma doesn't need the instruments and powders and whatever that the Wizard does, for instance). The books don't get too bogged down in it, but it does get fussier than I expected based on how light and fluffy and improvised so much of the feeling of the books is. There's also a kind of origin myth for Oz mentioned in one of the last couple of books (that contradicts information about Ozma from the second or third book; the continuity of the series can be pretty secondary). There's a fairy queen named Lurline that enchanted the non-magical land of Oz and (I think) left behind a fairy princess (Ozma) to rule over them.
Toto - He can talk in Oz, just like all other animals. And he occasionally does in the later books. This must have been something the kids wrote to Baum about because I think it isn't until somewhere in that last round of books that somebody comments on Toto's silence and Dorothy says he just keeps quiet unless he's got something to say.