When L. Frank Baum, the Historian of Oz, died in 1919, he'd already written two more 'Oz' books in addition to the twelve published during his lifetime. 'The Magic of Oz' and 'Glinda of Oz' were soon brought into print but that was it and neither his publishers nor his audience wanted it to end, so, perhaps inevitably, a new Historian of Oz was found to continue the series. Initially, that was Ruth Plumly Thompson, who contributed nineteen more volumes before falling out with the publishers. Others took over for another seven books to comprise what would become known as 'The Famous Forty', though she did return to Oz to write two more books in the seventies.

Readers in 1921 didn't know any of this, other than Baum had died, and Reilly & Lee kept his name on the cover of this book that he didn't write, even including an introduction to claim that it was based on notes of his, which has since been disproven. Only in some later editions, such as the Del Rey reprints from the eighties, has her name been restored as the author. Her next contribution, 'Kabumpo in Oz' boasted her name on the cover, but "Founded on and Continuing The Famous Oz Stories by L. Frank Baum", with his name in capitals and a much larger font size than hers.

Initially, I appreciated her take on Oz immensely because she carefully avoids one of Baum's go to approaches that I haven't liked from the outset, namely seemingly endless reunions. Instead, she has Professor Wogglebug visit the Emerald City to present a brilliant idea he's had to Ozma and a single paragraph covers fourteen regulars just like that. I much prefer that approach! By the way, the professor's idea is that he'll be the Great Grand Geneaologist of Oz and document everyone's family lines. That doesn't sit well with the Scarecrow, who descended from a beanpole.

Get it? Another approach Thompson clearly likes is wordplay, which was never absent while Baum was writing 'Oz' books but wasn't as prominent or as playful as it is in her hands. In only the second chapter, we meet an A-B-Sea Serpent, who's comprised of alphabet blocks, and a Rattlesnake who is literally made out of rattles. To help the Scarecrow over a river, the A-B-Sea Serpent becomes a bridge and suggests, as he goes across, that he mind his Ps and Qs. Not every instance of wordplay is that clever but a lot of them are and I appreciate having to stay aware as to whether something has one meaning or two.

The thrust of the story, which leads the Scarecrow to cross that river, is that he wants to discover his own heritage, because he may be the only person in Oz without a family. So he returns to the Munchkin farm where we first met him in 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' to find out more. One dig later and he falls down his family tree. See what I mean? In keeping with Baum's later books, she adds a second plot strand elsewhere in the land, which is Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion going to Winkie country to find the Scarecrow. They feel sorry for his lack of family and wonder if he might adopt them to become his family. That's not quite how genealogy works but it's good sentiment.

From here, Thompson stays with the episodic approach that Baum stuck to relentlessly, with the traditional journeys to new lands within Oz and the traditional introduction of new characters, a few of which I imagine will become regulars. So we meet Sir Hocus of Pokes, who isn't really from Pokes but has spent five hundred years as a prisoner there until Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion's rescue; a giant made of taffy called Bangladore; brothers called Ran and Mem, one of which does everything at random but the other at memorandum; and a pair of talking animals, the Doubtful Dromedary and the Comfortable Camel, who are precisely like you imagine them to be. I'll guess at three of those becoming regulars.

My favourite of these is Sir Hocus, who starts out like a one joke character but grows neatly with the book. In the City of Pokes, everyone shuffles and sleeps a lot because they're slow Pokes. The only way to counter that is to sing, but every time Sir Hocus tried to sing his way out of the city, he fell asleep. It takes all three of them to stay awake long enough to make it out. Once freed, he's a relatively traditional knight in shining armour who promptly sees Dorothy as his damsel to save. The longer he's outside of Pokes, the more he shifts back to the archaic language of the historical romances. Uds daggers! They find Fix City, whose people always stand still so their furniture can run around for them. They have roads that literally roll, long before science fiction caught up.

Of course, the primary story strand has to do with the Scarecrow, who finds that the beanpole he was found on extends deep into the earth and he tumbles all the way down, past the Middlings, a race of mud men who are rather creepy for an 'Oz' book, to the Silver Islands. He's never heard of the Silver Islands but its people, the Silvermen, immediately hail him as the reincarnation of their emperor, Chang Wang Woe, who has returned as prophecied fifty years to the day after his death to save his people once again. Which he does, but they don't want to let him go again.

There are problems here and the biggest one the book has is the sheer effrontery of a particular pun. In the City of Pokes, there's a Poke called Pid, who's only in the book so Sir Hocus can ask him to bring him some stew. As he's a Poke, he responds slowly, prompting Sir Hocus to repeat: "Stew, Pid!" I'm all for puns, lowest form of wit or not, but it takes real courage to set up something like that. I guess it would play better when parents read the book aloud to younger children, but still. That's a level below cringeworthy.

Another problem is the lack of explanations for outrageously convenient things, as I'm sure I can't be the only reader wanting to know things that Thompson has zero interest in explaining. At one point, Dorothy's group arrive in the Silver Islands, at a rather convenient moment, and Thompson honestly wrote this: "Now, by some magic which even I cannot explain, the people from Oz found they could understand all that was being said." Damn, that's cheap! Mostly what bugged me was the fan and parasol that arrive in the Silver Islands with the Scarecrow, as they were growing on the beanstalk. Both are key to getting past certain moments in the story but we're told precisely nothing more about them, which is rather frustrating.

The last problem is mostly a product of the time but Thompson mostly gets away with it. She has the Silvermen fashioned after the Chinese, though they apparently predate them, which makes this setup ripe for the latent racism of the time, but Thompson manages to avoid that except at introduction. The Scarecrow believes "they looked exactly like the pictures of some Chinamen he had seen in one of Dorothy's books back in Oz, but instead of being yellow their skin was a curious gray". Later on, we learn that they eat cats. That's not good.

On the positive side, there are new places and people, a whole slew of wordplay and a few clever touches that riff on things that Baum had set up in earlier books. For instance, Glinda reads in her magic book that the Emperor of the Silver Islands has returned to his people, but she has no idea what it means. Apparently the book doesn't go into enough detail to be useful in every occasion. Thompson gets details right that Baum traditionally got wrong, like where the Deadly Desert is. Mostly, though, it's the wordplay, which extends through puns and spoonerisms to plenty more songs and poems than Baum ever included in his books, even though she keeps them all short.

Bottom line, I like this first Ruth Plumly Thompson book and I'm eager to see how she continues in this vein (or not) throughout her run. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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