A review by abbydee
The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum

I love rereading things I first read when I was a kid. After so many years, it’s completely fresh and totally different to experience as an adult, but I can still see the things Little Abby loved about it. I remember having that moment in the library when I realized there were more Oz books, and being so delighted. I had no idea. 

It is interesting how different the sequels are from The Wizard of Oz. The Wizard of Oz is tied to a fairy tale structure–numbers are important, violence is casual. Like The Fellowship of the Ring, its plot is padded with “Oh, this would be a cool thing to happen in the woods!” Characters like the stork can come and go without becoming characters (anybody remember the stork? anybody?). Conversations in The Wizard of Oz are a bare fraction of the dialogue in The Land of Oz, where the attempts at wit proliferate. Every passing character here is a true character and will probably be back. You can see this in the way the palace guard morphs into The Soldier with the Green Whiskers. Dorothy isn’t much of a character in that first book, in that she has a goal but doesn’t contribute much to accomplishing it. Everything she does, she does by accident. Gregory what’s-his-face was kind of on to something when he took a second look at Oz’s political situation, which is truly messed up for a while and under extremely inept leadership. But I love how recognizably American the countryside is in The Land Of Oz, with crops of pumpkins and corn. 

There are some funny inconsistencies. In The Wizard of Oz, the houses and clothing of various parts of Oz vary in color, but there is no indication that the actual vegetation or people’s hair color changes. That’s only true in the Emerald City because of the fake green-tinted glasses everyone wears. But in The Land of Oz, the country of the Gillikins sports purple grass. It’s unclear whether things in the Emerald City are now truly green or if they are still all white, as was true when Dorothy visited. The Good Witch of the North continues to be a sort of mysterious person who is never encountered again after Dorothy met her randomly hanging out with the Munchkins. 

There is also some odd gender stuff in The Land of Oz, what with multiple armies of women and multiple politically powerful women, including Ozma as the legitimate ruler of Oz. But Tip is a stereotypical boy, with boyish activities and behaviors, who is initially pretty shocked by his gender swap and not pleased at all. Ozma says she hasn’t changed, but I’m dubious about that. Tip wasn’t particularly wise or good at leadership and didn’t remind me of someone who would make a good ruler. Tip is gone, and Ozma is functionally a new character.