The Emerald City of Oz
Lyman Frank Baum
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Feb. 8, 2018)
The Emerald City of Oz is the sixth of L. Frank Baum's fourteen Land of Oz books. It was also adapted into a Canadian animated film in 1987. Originally published on July 20, 1910, it is the story of Dorothy Gale and her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em coming to live in Oz permanently. While they are toured through the Quadling Country, the Nome King is assembling allies for an invasion of Oz. This is the first time in the Oz series that Baum made use of double plots for one of the books. Baum had intended to cease writing Oz stories with this book, but financial pressures prompted him to write and publish The Patchwork Girl of Oz, with seven other Oz books to follow. The book was dedicated to "Her Royal Highness Cynthia II of Syracuse" — actually the daughter (born in the previous year, 1909) of the author's younger brother, Henry Clay "Harry" Baum. At the beginning of this story, it is made quite clear that Dorothy Gale (the primary protagonist of many of the previous Oz books), is in the habit of freely speaking of her many adventures in the Land of Oz to her only living relatives, her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. Neither of them believes a word of her stories, but consider her a dreamer, as her dead mother had been. She is undeterred (unlike her alter ego in the film Return to Oz who is much perturbed by her guardians' doubts.)