Blown overboard while sailing with her uncle, Dorothy finds herself in the fairy realm of Ev. She sets out with her friends to rescue the Queen of Ev and her ten children, who have been imprisoned by the cruel Nome King. But even Ozma, the wise Ruler of Oz, is no match for the clever king, and it's up to Dorothy to save everyone from terrible danger. But will the Nome King's enchantments be too much even for the plucky little girl from Kansas? ( )

Dorothy and Ozma rescue the royal family of the land of Ev.

3/4 (Good).

It doesn't have an unexpected twist to the ending like the first two books did. But the weird creatures keep coming, the illustrations are improving quite a bit, and there's a sassy chicken.

(May 2022) ( )

I feel like Baum got his mojo back here after the stumble that was The Marvelous Land of Oz. I read this aloud to my toddler, and I think reading something aloud makes you aware of the pacing and the energy of the text. Like Wonderful Wizard, Ozma of Oz has a great, arresting opening that immediately plunges the reader (or listener) into adventure: Dorothy is on a ship at sea, a wave knocks her overboard, and soon she is adrift, clinging onto a chicken coop. It must have captured my son's attention, because soon he was sitting in a cardboard box on the floor, claiming to be floating in the ocean himself. Also like Wizard, Baum does a good job of introducing a set of weird characters who make contributions to the story: Billina the Yellow Hen is an utter delight, and surely one of the best Oz characters Baum ever devised, and I had great fun reading her dialogue aloud in a chicken voice. I also really like Tiktok, but found him hard to perform. It's okay to read in a monotone for a single line of dialogue, but sometimes he gets a page-long expository speech! Both Billina and Tiktok contribute to the problem-solving, unlike Marvelous Land's gang of misfits; indeed, it sometime seems that Dorothy is just along for the ride! This is the book where Baum begins making her speech less formal and precise, with contractions and mispronunciations that weren't present in Wonderful Wizard (even though, going by Neill's illustrations, she must be a couple years older).

I also had good fun reading the Hungry Tiger. (He doesn't contribute much, to be honest, but he is there.) And Langwidere. Really, this book is a delight, one of my favorites to begin with, and reading it aloud brought that out even more so.

This is one where I owned the Del Rey edition growing up; those reproduce the original illustrations, but they are mass market paperbacks, so everything was squished down, so I took the excuse to upgrade to a Books of Wonder facsimile edition, and it was well worth it.

The military humor went over my son's head. I am pretty sure this is the first time I read it where I got it myself! Sometime after we finished the book, he was talking about an "army of books," and I realized from context that he thought the word "army" meant "a big group," which is a pretty reasonable deduction. When I read these aloud, I sometimes massage the continuity and connections between books; for example, in the first book, I called the Emerald City maid who waits on Dorothy "Jellia Jamb" even though she's not given that name until book two. Similarly, here I made it clear that the lone private of the Oz army was the Soldier with the Green Whiskers from the first two books, something that the fourth book seems to indicate but even there isn't explicit about. (He just has a mustache here, not a long beard, but the Soldier did shave off his beard to escape detection by Jinjur's Army of Revolt in Marvelous Land.)

Weird thing I noticed: Billina gains the power of speech because she and Dorothy are in a fairy country, i.e., the Land of Ev... but when Billina interacts with some Ev chickens, we're told she's unusual because none of them can talk!

L. Frank Baum is an author I have read many times since I first discovered him in second grade. I find that his books stand up to the test of time and they are books that I enjoy re-reading. Some of them are stronger than others but as a whole I quite enjoy both the stories and characters. ( )

I'm actually quite enjoying the Oz books.
And I'm discovering that the details in the numerous film and tv adaptations I've seen, are a lot more accurate than I expected.
(In this case particularly, an adaptation by Syfy (I think it was called 'the Witches of Oz' or something similar, where the witches had detachable heads. I thought it was far-fetched, turns out it's from this book in the series. Granted, it's not a witch, but Princess Langwidere who has the replacable heads, but still...) ( )