Baum certainly could never resist a good pun. Along with "Ozma of Oz" and "Glinda of Oz" I think it has always been my favorite. It's the sixth in the series and has a lot of references to earlier events. The Scarecrow-remember he's the one with the brains !-comes up with a solution, but will it work ? You should read this Oz book to find out. Ozma, a bit late in the game, gets wind of the Nome King's plans, but seems to have no magic that can counter his evil intentions. They are going to emerge from the tunnel right in the Palace Gardens. On the second path, we follow the Nome King's preparations for the invasion and ultimate enslavement of all the Oz folks and the utter destruction of the country. On the first, Dorothy takes her aunt and uncle on a short tour of a bit of Oz, meeting all sorts of strange inhabitants along the way. He dumps a reluctant general or two, then finds an evil character who not only agrees to the invasion through a tunnel under the Deadly Desert, but goes to round up some even more fearsome allies. Meanwhile, back in the Kingdom of the Nomes, the evil king plots revenge against those nasty Oz people who took his magic belt-see "Ozma of Oz". Once there, she requests that Ozma bring her aunt and uncle, plain American folks from the prairies, to live in Oz. Dorothy gets Ozma, the beautiful, good queen, to transport her back to the Emerald City for good. Things in Kansas look terrible: Uncle Henry is likely to lose the farm. :)įor more book reviews, come visit my blog, Build Enough Bookshelves. It's definitely an improvement over the last few. He seemed almost gleeful to include Dorothy's little letter in the last chapter.
Baum put a bit more in to this book because he planned for it to be the last. Interesting in light of the time in which it was written (early 20th century, prior to World War I).Īnyway, I think Mr. Ozma's "I-won't-fight-even-to-save-my-people-from-a-fate-worse-than-death" approach kind of left that up to interpretation. Baum was a pacifist or, alternately, if he thought pacifists were ridiculous. Drove me nuts that she "really hadn't given it much thought" that creatures who hated her and everything she and her people stood for were about to ravage her land and enslave her people! Really? I wonder if Mr. And there was a genuine problem to overcome (i.e., the impending destruction of Oz by the Nomes and their allies). Baum can show off all the other ideas he has for interesting creatures (Look! These ones are living jigsaw puzzles! And over here we have animated flatware! And these people can't stop talking!) but on the whole there was more plot than we've seen for a few books.įirst of all, there was some actual evil in the form of the Nome King and his General Guph.
There was still an element of characters taking a trip just so Mr. I liked The Emerald City of Oz a bit better than the last two.
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