I love this book! It's been passed down on my father's side of the family. My grandmother's name (Lucy) is in it, even though she allegedly wasn't born until 1917. ( )

Just not feeling this one. I really have enjoyed (for the most part) reading through the entire Oz collection, but this one fell flat for me. The characters and situations didn't come alive for me and the plot was such a mish-mash that it felt cobbled together rather than fully conceived. I expected to be delighted and I was not. ( )

Tik-Tok of Oz is an odd book, though I knew none of it when I was a child. Baum adapted Ozma of Oz into a stage musical, just as he had Wonderful Wizard and Marvelous Land. But the stage rights to any characters who appeared in those musicals still belonged to those musicals' producers, so the new musical couldn't feature any of those characters. The resulting musical was evidently different enough that Baum, always looking to take shortcuts while writing, adapted it back into a novel! Yes there are quite a lot of similarities to Ozma of Oz... but I actually don't think I noticed as a kid!

What I did notice, reading it for the first time in decades, aloud to my three-year-old son, was that the Shaggy Man clearly meets Polychrome for the first time here, even though the two were travelling companions in Road. As I sometimes do, I edited it while reading it aloud, to make it clear that they did know each other. (Beside, the whole meeting scene is a set-up for a torturous bow/beau pun that would have gone right over my son's head.)

That said, as a kid it never was one of my favorites. I might blame the fact that it's one of two Oz books where my edition was an illustration-less Puffin Classic, but I didn't get much more out of it this time around. It has its moments: I like Queen Ann, especially at first, the Nome King and Kaliko are always fun.

But on the other hand, it has a lot of characters who don't do anything; I imagine Ozga and Private Files had some romantic duets on stage, but here they just stand around. Even more unfortunately, Tik-Tok is barely in it. I'd guess he made a great spectacle on stage, but again, he's just here most of the time. The main characters don't really do anything to defeat the Nome King; it's Quox the dragon sent by Tititi-Hoochoo who does all the work there. Betsy is pretty much a nonentity compared to Baum's other child protagonists like Dorothy and Trot and Ojo.

(Betsy knows what Oz is and that Dorothy is a princess there, indicating she must have read the Oz books. This fits with the conceit Baum introduced a couple books back, most notably Emerald City, that he was an historian receiving updates from a real place that he published in book form. However, Betsy doesn't know who the Nome King or Shaggy Man are... yet the only two books where Dorothy is a princess already are Emerald City and Patchwork Girl, and the Nome King appeared in the former and the Shaggy Man the latter!)

For the first time, my son expressed some aesthetic opinions on an Oz book. After the first couple chapters, all about Queen Ann wanting to conquer things, he told me he didn't want them to conquer anything. He doesn't like things to be broken! And once it was over he actually said it wasn't his favorite Oz book!

And yet... after we finished, he had a brief period of wanting to make his own Oz book, and he drew pictures for it, and enlisted me and Hayley to do it too. What was this Oz book called? Hank of Oz! See my blog for the details...

An American girl who is not Dorothy and her mule end up in the section of Oz that is a land of talking flowers. They meet the Shaggy Man, Polychrome, and Tik-Tok and they go on a journey and encounter the Nome King. All the Oz books are good. ( )

L. Frank Baum is an author I have read many times since I first discovered him in second grade. I find that his books stand up to the test of time and they are books that I enjoy re-reading. Some of them are stronger than others but as a whole I quite enjoy both the stories and characters. ( )