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...) ( )

I like the fact that L. Frank Baum wrote this book to appeal to all of his young fans who wanted to know what happened to Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion after book two in the series.

For those who have not read books 1 and 2, please note that some details below will contain spoilers about those books.

I only gave this book 4 stars though, mainly because the character of Dorothy just bugged me throughout. Also this book dragged a lot, unlike with book one and two I had a hard time just reading this one straight through. This is still a really good fairy tale though some of the subject matter I thought was probably a bit too old for most kids to be reading about.

The story begins with Dorothy and her Uncle Henry on a trip to Australia to visit some of their relatives there. I had so many thoughts here at this point.

One, why in the world did Aunt Em not get to come along. I know that it was said that Aunt Em stayed behind to run the farm, but Kansas and Australia in the 1900s was a very long sea voyage apart. So it was bewildering that Uncle Henry set off on such a journey without his wife.

Two, how old is Dorothy? We get the idea that time has passed since book one, but I still don't think that Baum has ever said her age. She's always referred to as a little girl. She definitely speaks like one.

We eventually get to Dorothy being blown overboard and she meets Billina the Hen. I actually thought that Dorothy had some nerve changing Billina's name from Bill to Billina because "Bill is a boy's name." Reading further along and seeing how Billina didn't suffer fools, I am surprised she didn't tell Dorothy to get over it.

How dreadful! exclaimed Dorothy, in a shocked voice.
What is dreadful? asked the hen, lifting her head to gaze with one bright eye at her companion.
Why, eating live things, and horrid bugs, and crawly ants. You ought to be 'SHAMED of yourself!

I do love how Billina calls out Dorothy for her hypocrisy since humans eat things that were one alive and eat animals that do eat bugs. I would have also asked her so you live on a farm right? You have never seen hens and roosters eating bugs? Did you think we survived on sunshine and air?

Dorothy comes across trees that contain lunch and dinner pails and seriously I want to find those trees and plant some of them in my backyard.

We then have Dorothy and Billina meeting the strange people called the Wheelers and coming across Tiktok the Machine Man. I think it is kind of cool that L. Frank Baum pretty much describes a robot. Remember that this book was written in 1907.

Eventually the threesome depart and come across the niece of the late King of Ev who sold his family to the Nome King. The niece is the Princess of Langwidere who has 30 heads....I don't know why but the whole thing with the Princess of Langwidere creeped me out.

Dorothy and her friends after being locked out are eventually rescued by the Princess of Ozma and her group and that is when the action at least starts to pick up.

Every time I try to picture the Princess of Oz I can't stop laughing though.


Probably because in book two we find out that the Wizard of Oz hid the Princess of Oz and gave her to Mombi who changed her into a boy named Tip.


We do get a lot of scenes with the Scarecrow acting even less intelligent than usual and the Cowardly Lion has picked up a friend called the Hungry Tiger whose constantly lamenting about how nothing can fill him up got tiresome after the first dozen times.

We do find out that Ozma of Oz came to the Kingdom of Ev to free the former queen and princes and princesses from the Nome King after they were sold to the Nome King. At this point I was 45 percent in the book and was surprised that it took this long for Baum to actually get to the bare bones of the book.

The interaction that the group had with the Nome King was interesting and that was probably the only time in the whole book that I thought the action really picked up and everything flowed together much more smoothly than in the other sections. I think that Baum was playing this book more for laughs than anything else since we had everyone at one time or another showing how not intelligent they were. After the first few times it was funny, after that I was groaning out loud and mumbling get on with it.

We eventually get to our happily ever after but we have to have the whole group travel back to the Emerald City where Dorothy gets to meet old and new friends alike.

There is one passage in the book that explains what happened to the character Jinjur who was a major character in book two. This whole passage made me cringe inwardly. I know that Baum was probably going for laughs, but I didn't chuckle at all. I felt like Baum was one making fun of women who could possibly want more than just being married to define them. And I thought him turning Jinjur into a husband beater was just bad form. I liked that Jinjur and her Army actually went and took down the Kingdom of Oz. I wasn't thrilled that their main reason to do so was so that they could get jewels for bracelets and to sell for gowns though.

I've married a man who owns nine cows, said Jinjur to Ozma and now I am happy and contented and willing to lead a quiet life and mind my own business.

Yep, cause when we women get married that's it. We are therefore happy and have no ambitions at all.

Where is your husband? asked Ozma.
He is in the house nursing a black eye, replied Jinjur calmly.
The foolish man would insist upon milking the red cow when I wanted him to milk the white one; but he will know better next time, I am sure.

The book ends and since readers already know that there are 14 Oz books, you know that Dorothy and crew have many adventures awaiting them in Oz. ( )