Patchwork Girl of Oz: 06/17/24

The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum and John R. Neill (1913) is the seventh book in the original Oz series. It's the second book in the series to be set entirely in Oz and to have a male protagonist and cohorts brought to life by magical powder.

Ojo and his uncle, Nunkie, live in surprising poverty (given Oz's socialistic propaganda). Having run out of food, the two leave their home and head to their nearest neighbor, Dr. Pipt, the self proclaimed Crooked Wizard. He's crooked both for being old and for being a lawbreaker.

When Dr. Pipt's last use of the Powder of Life goes awry, leaving his wife and Ojo's uncle petrified, Ojo and the titular, newly created Patchwork Girl, named Scraps Patches, set out for the second Yellow Brick road and the Emerald City.

This novel reads like a weird mashup between the first two Oz books: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904). Ojo has to go to the Emerald City but he also has a quest to find ingredients to save his uncle.

Ojo, though, doesn't do his quest only with the plucky friends he's made along the way. He must bring along some of the classic characters: Dorothy, Toto, and the Scarecrow. They serve to legitimize this book as being part of the Oz series to the once rabid fans who had forced Baum to revise his series despite closing the borders at the end of the last book.

Like the last book, the back half of this novel gets hung up on the exotic aspects of Oz as once again Quadling Country. This time the peoples aren't ones created from Glinda's magic. These meetings act as filler more than actual plot progression.

The ultimate goal in Glinda's area is a gill of water that has never seen the light of day. The solution to this problem dates the book even more than the inclusion of a sentient phonograph! The people who are in charge of mine and help Ojo find the water are mining radium. Not only mining it, but drinking it, and using it as a health tonic. Yikes!

The eighth book is Tik-Tok of Oz (1914).

Four stars

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