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In this, the fifth Oz book, Dorothy meets a lost man known only as the Shaggy Man (apparently a shabby hobo type) out in the Kansas countryside, and she tries to show him the road he's looking for, but they soon find they are, wait for it, they're "not in Kansas anymore." They meet some young characters, such as the lad Button-Bright, whose salient trait is the predilection of reply "Don't know" to every question, and Polychrome, the daughter of the rainbow. The group has a series of episodic adventures, meeting some donkey people, fox people, and the genuinely eerie Scoodlers, on their way to the Emerald City.

I love me some Oz adventures, but with this one, I was pretty ambivalent. First, the opening scene, in which a young girl goes off alone with a grown man hobo, who also carries a "Love Magnet" which makes everyone love him, is just a little problematic these days, just a tinge on this side of uncomfortable. But that's just modern sensibility. More importantly, I felt Baum was just phoning it in with this one. The adventures are great enough, but Button-Bright is a one-note joke (although the comment the Scarecrow makes about him at the end almost makes his presence worth it), and Polychrome, while a nice idea, adds nothing to the story. Next, the episodic style of the plot means most of the situations are resolved with a deus ex machina wave of the hand rather than any character development. Finally, and most nettlesome to me, the last section of the book wipes away any previously-supposed suspense or danger for the characters, and the final few chapters are just a list of characters from other books Baum wrote (in the introduction to this book, he implies that he would like children to admire his other books as well, so I guess he was trying to sell the Oz readers on these). I suppose he meant it to feel like an MCU-style reunion moment with all our favorite characters together again, but nobody cares about those non-Oz books, Frank!