Reading List Update: # 3 - 6

[jedibuttercup]

And... more of the Oz series. Curiouser and curiouser.

3. The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Hardcover, large print, 340pp. 7th of the Oz series. Reread. The bit that everyone remembers of this one is the Patchwork Girl herself, animated by the same Dr. Pipt's Powder of Life previously featured in Tip/Ozma's first adventure. She's whimsical, high-spirited, and ends up mutually fascinated with the Scarecrow-- clothpeople romance? Very cute. Not so cute are the subplots wherein Ozma bans all magic in the realms save Glinda's, and spends a lot of time watching her subjects in her Magic Picture for evidence of wrongdoing. The book follows Ojo, nephew of Unc Nunkie (who should have been King of the Munchkins but had inexplicably retired to the remote Blue Forest with baby Ojo back when Ozma first became Queen), in his adventure to save said uncle from a magical accident; other favorites (including Dorothy, of course) befriend or assist or lecture him along the way.

4. Tik-Tok of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Hardcover, large print, 272pp. 8th of the Oz series. Reread. In this one, the sub-Queen of a tiny valley in a remote corner of Oz decides to conquer the rest of the country. Glinda finds out and dumps Ann Soforth and her army outside Oz, coincidentally into the paths of Tik-Tok and the Shaggy Man, who were on an adventure to rescue Shaggy's brother from a recurring villain, the Nome King. A shipwrecked American girl named Betsy, her mule Hank, Polychrome from the 5th book, and Ozga the Rose Princess get tangled up in the plot; in the end, the group enlists a dragon's help, unseats the Nome King, teaches him a lesson, puts the king's Chamberlain Kaliko on the throne, finds Shaggy's brother, and then gets yanked to Oz for happily-ever-after-ness. Dorothy, of course, befriends Betsy instantly-- and Toto finally speaks.

5. The Scarecrow of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Hardcover, large print, 288pp. 9th of the Oz series. Reread. The Scarecrow actually only appears 2/3 of the way through, after Glinda decides to send him to intervene in the main plot. And he seems to have lost most of his wisdom, as he gets in several stupid scrapes that the other characters rescue him from. Ahem. Anyway, it's mostly about a girl called Trot and a one-legged retired sailor, Cap'n Bill, who boards at her mother's house. While he's babysitting her-- exploring in a boat-- they're sucked into a magic whirlpool, and after several adventures run across Button-Bright (of book 5) and a flying creature called an Ork who takes them into Oz. Unfortunately, they land in Jinxland, another of those blocked-off corners with a cruel sub-King, and get caught up in magical hijinks there, including a forced-marriage subplot. Of course, all ends happily, and Trot joins Betsy as the next Mary-Sue Best Friend of Dorothy After Ozma.

6. Rinkitink in Oz by L. Frank Baum. Hardcover, large print, 314pp. 10th of the Oz series. Reread. Contains the first appearance of an actual map of Oz and its neighboring countries. Set almost entirely in those neighboring countries, in fact, and is better for it. It concerns the rather engrossing tale of Prince Inga of Pingaree (with his friend, of the title) who sets out, with the help of three inherited Magic Pearls, to rescue his family and their subjects after a neighboring pair of monarchs conquers, plunders, and carries them off. Near the very end, when Inga has rescued almost everyone and rebuilding is underway, the evil monarchs escape alone with Inga's mom and dad and take them to the prisons of the Nome King. Inga follows, but can't quite save them-- and at this point, Dorothy, who'd noticed their plight via Glinda's Big Brother-y magic records book, arrives to enforce a happy ending.

Now, I still love these books. Very much. And on a children's story level, they remain very entertaining. But I can't help but analyze the underpinning structure as I go, and much of it is a lot more ominous than I think Baum ever intended. Yes, this is the world of "Tin Man", indeed.

A thought: consider that back in Book 1, the last person to own the Golden Cap that granted dominion over the flying monkeys was the Royal Sorceress Glinda herself...
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Comments

[bratfarrar]

3. Not so cute are the subplots wherein Ozma bans all magic in the realms save Glinda's, and spends a lot of time watching her subjects in her Magic Picture for evidence of wrongdoing

I loved this book--up until the point where the Tin Man refused to give Ojo the butterfly's wing, holding the butterfly's life as valuable as (if not more than) that of two people. And the part where Ojo basically gets hauled in always made me cringe. I don't know what Baum was trying for, but I was always squarely on Ojo's side and more than a little appalled by Ozma & company's treatment of him. (Less so by Dorothy, but still.)

6. Rinkitink in Oz has always been my favorite Oz book, and Inga my favorite Baum character.

[brendanm720.livejournal.com]

A thought: consider that back in Book 1, the last person to own the Golden Cap that granted dominion over the flying monkeys was the Royal Sorceress Glinda herself...

You know... A few weeks back, this occured to me.

You're thinking that Azkadelia's "friend" may have been Glinda?

[jedibuttercup]

The whole butterfly-wing thing was so hypocritical. (And not just because people > butterfly, which wouldn't die anyway if Baum's later theories on Oz bore out-- the Tin Man could have given it a Tin Wing). They turn a blind eye to the eating habits of the Lion and Tiger, so long as they don't eat anything living "on-screen", and are always asking the Glass Cat why she doesn't catch mice.

I thought they overreacted a little bit to Ojo, too. Despite Baum's "everyone is happy and considerate of each other in Oz, unless they live out in the boondocks" thing, even his star characters are often casually cruel to those they find disagreeable, for whatever reason. And how could Ojo have been expected to know any better, really?

As for Rinkitink: when I started reading the book, I had a severe deja-vu moment. Because I remembered the story quite clearly-- it was one of my favorite fairy tales as a child-- but I'd completely forgotten that it had anything to do with Oz, at all. I guess I was repressing the rather disappointing intervention of Dorothy at the end. Because Inga is plenty awesome, all by himself.

[jedibuttercup]

> You know... A few weeks back, this occured to me.
> You're thinking that Azkadelia's "friend" may have been Glinda?

It makes a certain amount of disturbing sense. She had the Golden Cap. She also-- as soon as she had disenchanted Ozma back into Princess form-- immediately had the girl outlaw all magic in Oz other than her own, and kept confiscating all the other magic users' equipment for herself. She even called herself the Sorceress.

Consider also that Ozma's "fairy blood" is repeatedly referenced, as is the fact that her magic is inborn, while most others (Glinda included) need tools and powders and so on. So if/when all the power went to Glinda's head and she needed putting down-- not much would be left except that bloodline magic, which Glinda could not have taken away.

Obviously, much of the rest of the ambient magic in the O.Z. faded to a pale shadow of itself afterward, with few magicians left to contribute to it. And somehow Ozma's magic got grafted into the bloodline of non-fairy Queen Dorothy Gale. Otherwise, though, I think it is a neater explanation for the origins of the Witch/Sorceress that possessed Azkadellia than "oh, the Wicked Witch became an evil spirit after she was turned to dust by Dorothy".

[bratfarrar]

You know, I only just realized how much "girl power" there is in the later books. All the boys either wind up needing to be saved by the girls or turn into girls (well, once). Which is kind of cool, but really I'd rather that things were a little more balanced. In Tin Man, DG was the one to save the day, but she never would have gotten to that point if it weren't for the guys.

Hrm. I wish I were at home so I could go back and reread some of the books.

[jedibuttercup]

There is an exception, though: Lost Princess. (Which I've finished, but not reviewed yet; it's #11 in the series). And that bothers me even more.

The girls do often save the guys-- but are very "girly" about it the whole time. And when a Bad Guy with a magic teleporting dishpan comes to the palace to steal Ozma's Magic Picture and she surprises him, he throws a sheet over her head and takes her with him. Not only does she not knock him down for his temerity, she meekly goes along with him as he completes his errands, then submits to being turned into a golden peach-pit and purposefully "lost". Only because the Expert at Being Lost, Button-Bright, is along with Dorothy's search-party, is she ever found.

So, yes-- the girls are powerful; but their power is all external, and apparently easy to take away. Without Ozma's picture and Silver Wand, she completely forgets she was ever Tip, who was fully capable of action! And Glinda can do nothing but advise after the bad guy takes her Record Book and magic instruments! And Dorothy could never have saved the day without her Magic Belt! Srsly, argh.

[bratfarrar]

Oh, that is interesting. There's a lot of potential there for backstory--perhaps Dorothy becoming queen had something to do with her being (almost) the first to come in from the outside? She saw things before Glinda was sort of running the show, and she, not Glinda, was the one to kill the Wicked Witch.

Though there is that pesky matter about how none of the kids ever seem to get any older, which I always found a bit baffling. We see families and adults throughout the series, but we don't see anyone age---although I could just be misremembering things.

[bratfarrar]

Yes, yes---I'd forgotten that one. When I read it, I had to go back and reread it, because I was sort of all "bwah?" by the end. Lots of wanting to shake people. (And the secondary plot of Toto losing his bark or growl or whatever was just silly.)

The books are awfully colonial, too, aren't they? Dorothy & co. going into some closed, more-or-less functioning society, and saying "oh, but Ozma rules over this place, didn't you know?" Now, in some cases the government is in some serious need of reform (or there isn't any), but what, exactly, gives Ozma the right to claim rule over some place she didn't even know existed?

(I should probably add that I adored these books as a child, and still reread them from time to time. But it's funny how writing fanfiction makes you look at things differently.)

[jedibuttercup]

Yeah. I've seen book reviews talking about how well the books have aged. And in some ways-- maybe so; they're pretty much unique as far as fairy tales go, and none of the magic or technology bits are particularly jarring. Some of the magic/scifi was even prophetic; the Magic Picture could swap out for a large-screen plasma TV hooked up to a security system easily enough, and the Shaggy Man uses a cell-phone-like earpiece-communicator to talk to Ozma in Tik-Tok. The cultural mores of the series, however, are a lot more dated than people like to think about. Manifest Destiny, and all.

[jedibuttercup]

The not-aging thing is much more a factor of the latter half of the series than the former; Baum mentions it explicitly in two or three of the last books, but the events of Land of Oz would have been completely different in a world where nobody could age or die.

Presuming one can find a way to reconcile all those issues, however, I still see no problem with simply having the magic "aura" of the land fade to a lower level after Glinda neutralizes all the lesser magic users, as if their presence and activities helped to maintain the status quo. So people would start aging and dying again more normally, though probably still more slowly than on the Other Side; and you'd have less random instances of, for example, Scarecrows coming to life or animals randomly breaking out in speech.