A Man With An Agenda

With 'Tik-Tok' I can cautiously believe that Baum had again become a little interested in his most famous creation. He is still recycling plots, forgetting what he wrote last year, and throwing in the odd reader-suggestion, but this felt like an actual adventure. The first one since 'Ozma'! Ojo's journey in 'Patchwork Girl' felt too episodic and meant nothing in the end.

A young woman sets out to expand her kingdom with an army consisting of a single private and a pack of lazy officers runs into the difficult situation of finding nothing to conquer. Betsy Bobbin and her mule Hank are washed up on a strange shore and meet up with the Shaggy Man in search of his imprisoned brother, an exiled flower princess, the rainbow's daughter (who hasn't learned anything from last time), and of course, an unwound Tik-Tok. All together they decide to go and conquer the underground Nome Kingdom.

'Tik-Tok' could easily have been as uneventful as previous books, but this time around the recycled elements and the magic worked better. Despite Baum's protestations to the contrary in some of his introductions, Oz can be a dark place. Case in point: Glinda's blase exile of Queen Ann in the beginning of the book, and the repeated reassurances that native denizens of Oz, or any fairyland, cannot die. They can be tortured, sure, or maimed, imprisoned, even torn apart. To emphasize the dangers of dragons to the Nome King, Kaliko casually talks about finding a single piece of a nome torn apart by one (specifically the part with the left eye and mouth) and how it told him what had happened. It had just been lying there for who-knows-how-long just waiting in the dark for someone to find it and put it back together.

Those streaks of unease (that may or may not be noticed by a child and give him or her nightmares for the rest of their lives) are what gives the Oz books the salt and grit it needs to be palatable.

Oz

Next: 'The Scarecrow of Oz'

Previous: 'The Patchwork Girl of Oz'