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52) "The Royal Book of Oz" - Ruth Plumly Thompson
So, she forgot all about the physics of falling through the earth, which (oddly enough) Baum at least somewhat remembered in "Tik Tok of Oz", but she came up with a reason why the Scarecrow became animated in the first place, and I found it a delightful reincarnation story.
And right now I'm SO glad that I just read "Tatterborn" (a short story by Daniel Heath Justice - thank you radientfracture! ) which used a similar concept. In Justice's story the Scarecrow remembers his past life, but it makes sense for Thompson's story that he can't remember it at all, or it would have slipped out before. In both stories someone was murdered and their soul inhabited and animated the scarecrow. Other than that the stories are pretty different.
But, I had to wonder why Baum never seemed to think that the Scarecrow being alive was not something that needed to be explained. He didn't always explain everything, but for most of the main non-human characters there was some explanation. Except for the very first friend and companion Dorothy has in Oz, and he's just there. Even he doesn't know why. This story does make the Scarecrow's assertion (in an earlier book) that he could hear the farmer as soon as his first ear was painted seem apocryphal, but then again he never seems to have spoken to the farmer or you'd have thought the farmer would never have put him up there - that would be just horribly cruel. Here, yes, you can talk and move around and I'll just stick you up here by yourself so that you'll be unable to move with nobody but the crows to talk to.
As I mentioned in my previous post, this book actually felt like there were actions going on, people doing things - it was much more engagingly written than Baum ever did. Maybe even a bit overboard, as there were names and details we didn't need, but motion. And there were two sets of characters doing different things who came together at the end and sorted it out, and every character gets much better developed than I've ever seen before. Glinda and Ozma don't ruin everything by looking in their magic book and picture and fixing all the problems before an proper end can be resolved by the characters, and there's reasons given for that - Ozma is off stopping a small war and Glinda can't make sense of the brief line which her magic news book gives her.
On the downside there's forgetting physics, there's some other stuff that happens at the end that wasn't necessary and didn't make sense, and there's some casual racism - she refers to 'Chinamen'. I feel like... as adults we can know that's not okay these days and move on, but probably parents should have a heads up that this is in there and talk to kids to make sure they don't go using that phrase to their friends at school and tick someone off. Baum didn't entirely escape that, though he did pretty well over all. I may have forgotten to mention that, in "Rinkitink in Oz", Ozma has to transform someone several times in order to work them back to their original form, and one of the in-between forms is (something like) 'a Hottentot - an inferior type of human.' Ow. Very wincey.
So, she forgot all about the physics of falling through the earth, which (oddly enough) Baum at least somewhat remembered in "Tik Tok of Oz", but she came up with a reason why the Scarecrow became animated in the first place, and I found it a delightful reincarnation story.
And right now I'm SO glad that I just read "Tatterborn" (a short story by Daniel Heath Justice - thank you radientfracture! ) which used a similar concept. In Justice's story the Scarecrow remembers his past life, but it makes sense for Thompson's story that he can't remember it at all, or it would have slipped out before. In both stories someone was murdered and their soul inhabited and animated the scarecrow. Other than that the stories are pretty different.
But, I had to wonder why Baum never seemed to think that the Scarecrow being alive was not something that needed to be explained. He didn't always explain everything, but for most of the main non-human characters there was some explanation. Except for the very first friend and companion Dorothy has in Oz, and he's just there. Even he doesn't know why. This story does make the Scarecrow's assertion (in an earlier book) that he could hear the farmer as soon as his first ear was painted seem apocryphal, but then again he never seems to have spoken to the farmer or you'd have thought the farmer would never have put him up there - that would be just horribly cruel. Here, yes, you can talk and move around and I'll just stick you up here by yourself so that you'll be unable to move with nobody but the crows to talk to.
As I mentioned in my previous post, this book actually felt like there were actions going on, people doing things - it was much more engagingly written than Baum ever did. Maybe even a bit overboard, as there were names and details we didn't need, but motion. And there were two sets of characters doing different things who came together at the end and sorted it out, and every character gets much better developed than I've ever seen before. Glinda and Ozma don't ruin everything by looking in their magic book and picture and fixing all the problems before an proper end can be resolved by the characters, and there's reasons given for that - Ozma is off stopping a small war and Glinda can't make sense of the brief line which her magic news book gives her.
On the downside there's forgetting physics, there's some other stuff that happens at the end that wasn't necessary and didn't make sense, and there's some casual racism - she refers to 'Chinamen'. I feel like... as adults we can know that's not okay these days and move on, but probably parents should have a heads up that this is in there and talk to kids to make sure they don't go using that phrase to their friends at school and tick someone off. Baum didn't entirely escape that, though he did pretty well over all. I may have forgotten to mention that, in "Rinkitink in Oz", Ozma has to transform someone several times in order to work them back to their original form, and one of the in-between forms is (something like) 'a Hottentot - an inferior type of human.' Ow. Very wincey.