Thompson's fourth Oz novel has often been accused of being derivative of her second, and it's pretty hard to disagree. Like in Kabumpo in Oz, a prince of a small pocket kingdom in Oz goes on a quest, looking for a princess; on the way, he begins to have feelings for a strange girl, only to discover in the end that the girl is actually a princess under enchantment, and so everything works out.

I don't think this is a problem per se; if Grampa in Oz had been as well done as Kabumpo, I think I would have liked it as much regardless of how derivative it was. And I did like it: Prince Tatters of Ragbad is accompanied by an old soldier nicknamed "Grampa" (the only soldier left in Ragbad, more on that later), a Chicago weathercock brought to life who goes by the name of Bill (and who comes by it, for that matter), and a flower fairy named Urtha (she's the one who turns out to be a princess, Princess Pretty Good of Perhaps City). Meanwhile, Dorothy is travelling in the Winkie Country and bumps into Percy Vere, the Forgetful Poet of Perhaps City, himself looking for Perhaps City's lost princess. It's a fun set of characters. Grampa is entertaining, but I particularly liked the single-minded weathercock, who embraces Tatters's quest wholeheartedly, and thus is always demanding of everyone if they are a princess and/or have a fortune, and immediately loses interest if not. Percy is also a good character: his gimmick is that he always forgets the last words of his poems, leaving other characters to fill it in—or rather, the listener. My three-year-old son is still attempting to grok the concept of rhymes, but he did get it right on a couple occasions, much to his delight and mine. Some of the escapades on the way are pretty fun, particularly the bandits of the Blue Forest and the wicked washwomen of Monday Mountain and the dragon with false teeth on the island of Isa Poso. The book features a prophecy that isn't fulfilled the way you except, which is well done.

But somehow even though I enjoyed any individual chapter, on the whole it didn't quite grab me. I think this is because Prince Tatters and Urtha lack the level of definition Thompson gave the similar characters of Prince Pompa and Peg Amy. Tatters very much feels like he's always along for the ride, and even though Urtha's thing of flowers sprouting wherever she steps is fun, she does little else other than be dainty and nice—compare to how Peg Amy brings out the best in Wag and Kabumpo, touching everyone around her. When it's revealed that Peg Amy was the Princess of Sun Top Mountain, there was an emotional catharsis; here, when it turned out that Urtha was the princess, it's a good if predictable plot twist (though my son's mind was boggled), but I didn't feel anything, and I know Thompson can make me feel.

Thompson has her own vision of Oz that isn't Baum's... but then Baum's vision of Oz in one book wasn't necessarily his vision in his next, either. We hear about money in Oz for the first time in a long while; Ragbad used to export cloth to the rest of Oz, but Prince Tatters's father, King Fumbo, stopped paying his laborers when he took the throne because he spent the money on books instead. Without money, the laborers mostly deserted the country, and those who were left weren't enough to do all the cloth picking, leading to a downward spiral. But I don't mind because it's a fun story. The army deserted when they were no longer being paid, leaving only Grampa.

Grampa, we're told, was the veteran of 980 battles. But when were all these wars, and who was the army of Ragbad fighting? Maybe it all fits into the interregnum period, after Ozma's grandfather was deposed by the wicked witches, before Ozma took the throne. One can imagine that during the era of the wicked witches and the reign of the Wizard of Oz, there was a lot of combat in Oz between the small kingdoms. Did Ragbad attack the Munchkin country and fight whatever army the Tin Soldier belonged to? Did Grampa and his fellows march with the armies of Glinda as she retook the Quadling Country from the Wicked Witch of the South? Like so much about Oz history, I guess we will never know... which is exactly what makes it so interesting.

Like with Cowardly Lion, Grampa recently came into the public domain and thus has been released as a print-on-demand edition from SeaWolf Press. The quotation marks all go the right way here, but like with Cowardly Lion it reproduces at least one error from the Project Gutenberg edition: the bandit Vaga briefly becomes "Yaga" for a couple pages, which I suspect was an OCR error Gutenberg's proofreaders missed. One of the chapters is also missing its header illustration. But still, for $8, you can't do much better, as no one else has bothered to release this run of Thompsons since Del Rey in the 1980s.

This book marked the first anniversary of me and my son's Oz journey; I wrote up some thoughts on that on my blog.

Grampa in OZ
Bryan O'Keeffe

This book was absolutely amazing. I was always familiar with The Wizard of Oz because of the movie and also found out it was from a book series. However I had never heard of this book. I think this book blew everything out of the water. I really loved how at the beginning of every chapter there was a black and white illustrations of the different characters of the book. They were drawn to look super sinister and evil and it worked. These pictures gave an eerie feeling to the book that I loved. I also loved the illustrations in this book. They did alternate between color and black and white, which normally bothered me, but being that this was about OZ I think worked to its advantage. Being as OZ is a mysterious place the illustrations helped add to the story and the imagination of the reader. The characters were very believable as well, regardless of the fact that I was familiar of the movie. The strange land of OZ seems like a plausible place because there aren't a lot of mysterious things and being that it is mostly just magic involved. This book is a must read for all fans of the OZ movies.

One of the earlier examples of the continuation of the Oz series by Ruth Plumly Thompson. I own very few of them but this is actually fairy clever. I like lines like ":ten thousand tons of thunder clapped the castle on the back." The story involves an old soldier, Grampa, and a young prince, Tatters, from th poor kingdom of Ragbad adventuring in Oz and meeting Dorothy. ( )