The Last Dragon of Oz: 05/05/25

The Last Dragon of Oz by Whitney L. Spradling (2025) is a standalone romance set in a place called Oz with characters who have nicknames that happen to be Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion, and a woman named Daciana who dresses somewhat like O.G. Dorothy and is gifted a pair of magical silver slippers. Daciana has also found herself the adoptive mother of an unexpected baby dragon.

Instead of beginning in Kansas, the story starts in a rather gray kingdom that knows of magic but hasn't had any for a generation or more. Daciana at twenty-six somewhere between ten and twenty years older than Dorothy (who does seem to age for the first few volumes before Baum decided there was no more aging or dying in Oz).

And as this is a romance with erotic undertones, Daciana is sexually active. Two of the three men who take her to Oz also are and the final one is pretty much ace.

Like the Faeries of Oz series by Candace Robinson and Amber R. Duell, Spradling goes hard on the idea that everyone in Oz is both fae and humanoid. She also provides an Italian inspired taxonomy for all the different kinds of fae Daciana et al encounter.

Twenty-three Oz books are in the public domain (the original Baum fourteen and nine of the Ruth Plumly Thompson books. There's a lot of material available. I wish more of the books were used as inspiration beyond the original one. For all my complaints about language choice in the Faeries of Oz books or the extreme dystopian nature of the Dorothy Must Die series by Danielle Paige, I prefer how both series draw from a wider range of the books.

This one, sticks to just the first book, though I suppose with Oz being cut off from the rest of the world and everyone being fae, I suppose the Emerald City of Oz book should be counted as included. Otherwise, though, this book is really Oz light. It has humanoid representations of the original companions and three witches (named here as fates). There's also the Yellow Brick Road, Emerald City, field of poppies, and death by melting in water.

The rest of Oz is left to the author's own imagination to give time and space for the polycule to develop. That's fine. Taken out of the context of Oz, the relationship of Daciana to the three men, reminds me quite favorably to I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I'm Trapped in a Rom-Com by Kimberly Lemming (2025).

Although this book is a standalone, were the author to do further romances with other Oz character pairings, I would totally read them.

The novel like every book set in Oz (or OZ adjacent), The Last Dragon of Oz is set in the Road Narrative Spectrum. Daciana and her men are a family of travelers (33). Their destination is utopia (FF) because OZ is cut off from the rest of the world. Their route there is the cornfield (FF) as represented by the fields they use to cross to and from.

Four stars

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