The Lost Princess Of OZ!

The Lost Princess of OZ by L. Frank Baum is the eleventh book in the OZ series which continued into the 1960's. And after a few retrofits, we get an OZ book proper. These are children's books and so I cannot grade according to my preferences as an adult, so it makes sense to me that Baum at the very least namechecks most all the characters who have appeared in the series so far. But it's getting to be quite a list. In this one he goes further and has quite a lot of them actively involved and frankly it feels like too many. 

The title is accurate. Ozma the ruler of OZ along with assorted magical items go missing and Dorothy leads a kingdom wide search for her. She divides the players into teams to search the whole of OZ both fully explored and otherwise. In her cadre we have Dorothy herself, Toto (who talks quite a bit in this one), the Cowardly Lion, the Wizard of OZ, Button Bright, Trot, Scraps the Patchwork Girl, Betsy Bobbin, and more. It all gets to be a bit much to keep track of everyone. They go past spinning rubber mountains to find a mysterious realm in which the strangely shaped folks eat only thistles. At the same time that this is happening Frogman (a giant frog who considers himself the smartest creature in the kingdom) has left his kingdom of Yip where he was considered the smarted creature around to help Cayke the Cookie Maker find her special and also magical golden dishpan.  Turns the culprit is a chap dubbed Ugu the Shoemaker and eventually our two teams join forces to confront him. 

Where I have breezed through some of the earlier novels, this one was a trudge. Perhaps it the avalanche of characters, because many of them disappear into the crowd. Why include them if they aren't going to do anything special. Also, I think Baum's tone seems to have shifted from a spritely sense of fun to a more rigorous write-by-numbers approach. He had been trying to get away from OZ for years, but always he had to come back to the series to make money. Perhaps he just considered it a chore. That's being unfair to the book most likely, but that was my experience reading it. 

Next time it's The Tin Woodman of OZ and we hopefully will get some attention paid to Nick Chopper who has been surprisingly absent from most of the stories. 

Rip Off