Hidden Valley of Oz

1951, 1991 International Wizard of Oz edition
Rachel R. Cosgrove
Illustrated by "Dirk" (Dirk Gringuis)
Hidden Valley of Oz
Original and/or purchase price unknown
Worn paperback
C

A giant pink-eyed rat waves to a little boy and very cartoony versions of the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Hungry Tiger.  Oh boy!  I can't wait to read this!

Maybe in the early 1950s, the artwork didn't stand out as so bad, but it certainly doesn't look inviting now.  Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, and this is indeed a much weaker book than The Lion, tWatW.  I didn't read it till I was an adult, but I can't imagine ever enjoying it as much as Baum.  The writing is OK.  Cosgrove has some creative ideas, like Spots the Leopard who changes, well, his spots.  But she shows a Thompsonian liking for rambling.  Characters will show up and then leave, for almost no reason in either case.  Again like Thompson, she gives Dorothy almost nothing to do.  Not that the Snowically-badly named protagonist "Jam" has much to do either.  The actual hero is the aforementioned rat, Percy the Personality Kid, who calls everyone "kiddo."

One thing that Cosgrove does better than the other Royal Historians, including Baum, is write doggerel.  She's got some clever rhymes for the Rhyming Dictionary, a citizen of Bookville.  I wish she'd been given the task of going back and rewriting the poetry in most of the previous Oz books, particularly some of Thompson's.  As for writing a full-length Oz book, well, obviously it's not the worst.  She shows more knowledge of Oz than Neill did, and of course more sanity.  Given an artist who could improve and a second chance, like Snow got, her second book would probably get a B-.

And in fact, in her forty-years-later Afterword, she tells of her then still unreleased Wicked Witch of Oz.  The International Wizard of Oz Club published it in '93, five years before her death.  I've never read it, but I do appreciate that they got Eric Shanower, the best modern Oz artist, to do the illustrations.  Dirk died in '74, after illustrating three Boxcar Children books among others.  Presumably, he'd improved by then.

There's one more book of the Famous Forty.  For years and years, I've been hearing that it's a vast improvement over the post-Thompson stories.  So of course I've never seen Merry Go Round in Oz (1963).  I suppose I could get it as an interlibrary loan, but it wouldn't fit in with this project.  We'll see how I feel when I get up to '63, since I could mention it briefly in another post.