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I think I just fell off the cliff
Jul. 9th, 2003 09:52 amI'm now reading The Road to Oz, the fifth Oz book.
Kibo warned me that the Oz books suffer a serious decline in quality at some point, after which Baum is clearly just cranking the things out for the cash and not trying very hard. There are a couple of volumes yet before he switches to a yearly schedule... but I think I just hit the downslope. He's coasting at this point.
I'm almost halfway through Road. Dorothy's teamed up with some creepy old vagrant who has a Love Magnet that makes everyone love him, and an extremely stupid and annoying little kid. The Love Magnet means that none of the adventures they have could possibly be interesting unless the vagrant turns out to be evil, and that possibility is just generating an unpleasant subtext that I suspect wasn't intended.
So, by Oz standards, almost nothing has happened. They've visited a town of foxes who magically gave the kid a fox head out of mistaken generosity, and a town of donkeys who, in exactly the same manner, magically gave the vagrant a donkey head out of mistaken generosity. And now they're talking to a guy who involuntarily makes annoying music. In Wizard all this would have happened in about two pages and they'd be on to something else.
Kibo warned me that the Oz books suffer a serious decline in quality at some point, after which Baum is clearly just cranking the things out for the cash and not trying very hard. There are a couple of volumes yet before he switches to a yearly schedule... but I think I just hit the downslope. He's coasting at this point.
I'm almost halfway through Road. Dorothy's teamed up with some creepy old vagrant who has a Love Magnet that makes everyone love him, and an extremely stupid and annoying little kid. The Love Magnet means that none of the adventures they have could possibly be interesting unless the vagrant turns out to be evil, and that possibility is just generating an unpleasant subtext that I suspect wasn't intended.
So, by Oz standards, almost nothing has happened. They've visited a town of foxes who magically gave the kid a fox head out of mistaken generosity, and a town of donkeys who, in exactly the same manner, magically gave the vagrant a donkey head out of mistaken generosity. And now they're talking to a guy who involuntarily makes annoying music. In Wizard all this would have happened in about two pages and they'd be on to something else.