Ozathon 2024: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum

This is the fourth book of the Oz series. It wasn’t one of my favorites, and that didn’t change with this reading. It has quite a few inventive (and frightening) adventures, but I don’t think it’s as memorable as the other books in the series. 

The story begins with Dorothy traveling to Hugson’s Ranch in Northern California to see Uncle Henry. She gets off a train and finds her cousin Zeb asleep in a buggy waiting for her. They are setting off for the ranch when an earthquake hits and their horse and buggy plunge into a chasm.  After a terrifying fall into the earth, they gradually float into a city with glass buildings, colored lights, and strange-looking creatures. This turns out to be Mangaboo, where Dorothy and Zeb encounter another falling traveler, the Wizard.

The party tries to get back to the earth’s surface, encountering savage invisible bears, hungry dragons, wooden gargoyles, and treacherous mountain passages. There’s a lot of magic in this book (except by the Wizard), and Baum’s creativity is on full display, with fruits that make people invisible, leaves that allow the characters to walk on water, wooden wings, people who grow on bushes until they are ripe, and boxes of rustles and flutters (good for making you sound like you’re walking around in a fancy gown).

Where Ozma of Oz focused mainly on one villain, Dorothy and the Wizard is much more episodic, which I found less interesting because the travelers don’t spend enough time in any one place to build much tension. I enjoyed the part about Mangaboo, with its thorny Sorcerer and its system of picking people when they are ripe.  Baum is at his best when he’s satirizing flawed government practices, like allowing the current ruler to choose when to pick the next ruler, even though that means he’ll be killed.  But the other parts of the book were a series of unrelated events. Many items are introduced but never used, like the fruits of invisibility and the rustles and flutters. In Baum’s other books, someone would have pocketed those fruits and used them later.

Another of Baum’s strengths is creating funny, likeable, and flawed side characters, but I did not find those in this book. Zeb has little personality, and the Wizard doesn’t have much either. Jim and Eureka are more interesting, though problematic (I have a lot of thoughts about the trial of Eureka but won’t put them in this review). Baum was probably not a cat person, as his two cat characters are insufferable (though he does portray their grace, ferocity and independence fairly accurately).

While many of Baum’s books are fairly violent, this one seemed more so than the others. The Wizard kills the Sorcerer of Mangaboo after the Sorcerer stops the Wizard from breathing. The travelers are entombed multiple times and are nearly eaten by bears and dragons before being imprisoned by the Gargoyles.  While none of these events were ever seriously threatening, the characters talk about dying at nearly every turn.  Even Ozma threatens multiple times to put Eureka to death in the trial sequence (which seems quite out of character) and then the Lion and Hungry Tiger threaten Jim.

And then there’s the “elephant in the room” in this book, which is that Baum completely changes the Wizard’s history from what is described in the first two books. In Wizard of Oz, he’s portrayed as someone who scares people with trickery and puts them in danger in order to rid himself of the threat of wicked witches.  In Land of Oz, he bargains with a witch to kidnap and transform the heir to Oz’ throne, in order to keep himself in power. In this book, he’s a benevolent man who is deeply loved by his people and who desires no power whatsoever. He is even portrayed as knowing nothing about Ozma’s history.

I’ve never been terribly bothered by Baum’s inconsistencies regarding the history of Oz, except for this one. I wish he’d found a way to explain the Wizard’s role without completely erasing what happened in The Land of Oz – for example, Mombi could have lied about his involvement, or he could have done those things but had a major change of heart.  Instead, Baum just ignores the inconsistencies and rewrites Oz history in a major way. 

Baum’s introductions to these books are always fascinating. In this one, he tells his readers that he knows a lot of non-Oz stories and wants to write them. But he loves his fans and wants to make them happy, and they want Oz. In this book he attempts to please his “loving tyrants” by adopting as many of their suggestions as could be “fitted into one story.” Unfortunately, it shows, and I can only say that this book lacks the heart (and certainly the coherent storyline) that make most of his other books so wonderful.

If you’ve posted about this book, please share your thoughts and a link in the comments. You can find a review here by Puss Reboots and you can find more posts about Oz at Entering the Enchanted Castle. Thanks for joining our Ozathon!