Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
An earthquake opens a crack in the ground, and Dorothy falls down, down, down into the middle of the Earth. Her cousin Zeb, a horse named Jim, and a very proud kitten named Eureka fall with her. Underground they find a city made of glass, people who grow on plants like vegetables, and an old friend, the Wizard of Oz. Their trip home is full of danger and surprises.
Unlike the road journeys of the earlier Oz books, this one descends. Baum organizes the story as a fall through a series of underground countries, each stranger than the last: the Glass City of the vegetable Mangaboos, the Valley of Voices, the wooden Gargoyles, and the den of invisible bears, before Ozma's magic picture lifts the party to the Emerald City.
The book's running theme is pride and its puncturing. The Mangaboos are beautiful and heartless, the Gargoyles despise noise, and Eureka the kitten, the vainest character Baum ever wrote, ends the book on trial for her life, accused of eating one of the Wizard's piglets. Dorothy's plain honesty is the measure against which every proud creature is judged.
It lasts because it is the most daring of the Oz journeys, a trip through the nightmare side of Baum's imagination that still resolves into his sunny moral world. Generations of children have shivered pleasurably at the Gargoyles, argued about Eureka's trial, and remembered the underground kingdoms long after tamer fairylands faded.
L. Frank Baum published Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz in 1908, the fourth Oz book, and it begins with an earthquake: a crack in a California ranch swallows Dorothy, her cousin Zeb, the cab horse Jim, and Eureka the kitten. Far below they find a glass city, vegetable people, flying wooden gargoyles, and the Wizard himself, descending by balloon with nine tiny piglets. It is the strangest, darkest journey Baum ever sent his heroine on.
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, published by L. Frank Baum in 1908, is the fourth book of the Oz series and in many ways its boldest. Baum had meant to end the series more than once, but his readers demanded Dorothy back, and he answered with a story unlike any before it: not a quest along a road, but a fall through the earth itself. An earthquake at the California ranch of Dorothy's uncle drops her into a cavern world lit by colored suns, accompanied by her cousin Zeb, the patient cab horse Jim, and Eureka, a white kitten of magnificent self importance. Below wait the cold, lovely Mangaboos, who grow on bushes and pluck their rulers ripe; the invisible bears; the wooden Gargoyles, silent by day and murderous by night; and, descending by balloon with a pocketful of tiny piglets, the Wizard of Oz himself, returning to the series as a full character. The book closes in the Emerald City with a comic trial that turns surprisingly tense. Readers should expect a darker, stranger Oz than the first book's, full of invention and real peril, and a perfect example of why Baum's audience would not let him stop.
Edition: An older Project Gutenberg text (ebook 420) also circulates. Text: Standard Ebooks edition.
The first chapter
It’s no use; no use at all. The children won’t let me stop telling tales of the Land of Oz. I know lots of other stories, and I hope to tell them, some time or another; but just now my loving tyrants won’t allow me. They cry: “Oz—Oz! more about Oz, Mr. Baum!” and what can I do but obey their commands?
This is Our Book—mine and the children’s. For they have flooded me with thousands of suggestions in regard to it, and I have honestly tried to adopt as many of these suggestions as could be fitted into one story.
After the wonderful success of Ozma of Oz it is evident that Dorothy has become a firm fixture in these Oz stories. The little ones all love Dorothy, and as one of my small friends aptly states: “It isn’t a real Oz story without her.” So here she is again, as sweet and gentle and innocent as ever, I hope, and the heroine of another strange adventure.
There were many requests from my little correspondents for “more about the Wizard.” It seems the jolly old fellow made hosts of friends in the first Oz book, in spite of the fact that he frankly acknowledged himself “a humbug.” The children had heard how he mounted into the sky in a balloon and they were all waiting for him to come down again. So what could I do but tell “what happened to the Wizard afterward”? You will find him in these pages, just the same humbug Wizard as before.
There was one thing the children demanded which I found it impossible to do in this present book: they bade me introduce Toto, Dorothy’s little black dog, who has many friends among my readers. But you will see, when you begin to read the story, that Toto was in Kansas while Dorothy was in California, and so she had to start on her adventure without him. In this book Dorothy had to take her kitten with her instead of her dog; but in the next Oz book, if I am permitted to write one, I intend to tell a good deal about Toto’s further history.
Princess Ozma, whom I love as much as my readers do, is again introduced in this story, and so are several of our old friends of Oz. You will also become acquainted with Jim the Cab-Horse, the Nine Tiny Piglets, and Eureka, the Kitten. I am sorry the kitten was not as well-behaved as she ought to have been; but perhaps she wasn’t brought up properly. Dorothy found her, you see, and who her parents were nobody knows.
I believe, my dears, that I am the proudest storyteller that ever lived. Many a time tears of pride and joy have stood in my eyes while I read the tender, loving, appealing letters that came to me in almost every mail from my little readers. To have pleased you, to have interested you, to have won your friendship, and perhaps your love, through my stories, is to my mind as great an achievement as to become President of the United States. Indeed, I would much rather be your storyteller, under these conditions, than to be the President. So you have helped me to fulfill my life’s ambition, and I am more grateful to you, my dears, than I can express in words.
I try to answer every letter of my young correspondents; yet sometimes there are so many letters that a little time must pass before you get your answer. But be patient, friends, for the answer will surely come, and by writing to me you more than repay me for the pleasant task of preparing these books. Besides, I am proud to acknowledge that the books are partly yours, for your suggestions often guide me in telling the stories, and I am sure they would not be half so good without your clever and thoughtful assistance.
L. Frank Baum
Coronado, 1908.
Source: Standard Ebooks. Published 1908. Author died 1919. Public domain. Share this book: WhatsApp
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