This one is a bit of a chore to read, and you can really tell Baum was phoning it in at this point of the Oz series. To sum it up briefly, the book is mainly a series of pointless encounters with strange communities of characters before Dorthy and friends deus ex machina their way across the Deadly Desert into Oz, and from there we have Ozma's birthday party, which is basically just a shameless plug for Baum's other books, the ones he'd rather us be reading, as characters from those books show up to the party. There's no villain, no tension, nothing's really at stake. It's boring. At least the previous book had enough weirdness to keep things interesting. For those of you thinking about calling it quits though, don't, the books do get a lot better later. The next two books after this are some of my favorites. Shaggy Man, Button Bright and Polychrome all go on to do bigger better things after their lack luster debut. Unless you're really a completionist, you might want to just read a summary of this book online somewhere so you aren't lost when the characters show up in later books, and save yourself the trouble.
A boring journey to Oz
This one is a bit of a chore to read, and you can really tell Baum was phoning it in at this point of the Oz series. To sum it up briefly, the book is mainly a series of pointless encounters with strange communities of characters before Dorthy and friends deus ex machina their way across the Deadly Desert into Oz, and from there we have Ozma's birthday party, which is basically just a shameless plug for Baum's other books, the ones he'd rather us be reading, as characters from those books show up to the party. There's no villain, no tension, nothing's really at stake. It's boring. At least the previous book had enough weirdness to keep things interesting. For those of you thinking about calling it quits though, don't, the books do get a lot better later. The next two books after this are some of my favorites. Shaggy Man, Button Bright and Polychrome all go on to do bigger better things after their lack luster debut. Unless you're really a completionist, you might want to just read a summary of this book online somewhere so you aren't lost when the characters show up in later books, and save yourself the trouble.