Ozma of Oz
core novel 1907 Oz
Record
| First published | 1907 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.95 (27,750 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780688066321 |
| Internal chronology | 3 |
Synopsis
In Ozma of Oz, Dorothy is swept overboard during a storm while traveling by ship to Australia and washes ashore alone in the unfamiliar kingdom of Ev, accompanied only by a talking hen named Billina she meets on the voyage. There she encounters the mechanical man Tik-Tok and learns that Ev has no proper ruler to turn to for help, while the kingdom's eccentric princess, Langwidere, who owns a collection of interchangeable heads, takes Dorothy prisoner for her own peculiar reasons. As Dorothy searches for a way to escape Langwidere's palace, Princess Ozma and the royal court of Oz arrive on a rescue mission of their own, setting up a confrontation with a mysterious adversary whose designs on Ev's throne threaten the kingdom's fragile order.
Where it sits
- Universe: Oz
- Series: The Oz Books core; position 3 of 14 in the series' recorded order
- Author: L. Frank Baum
Notes
- From the series record (The Oz Books): L. Frank Baum's own 14 Oz novels, one continuous author-written saga (1900-1920, the last published posthumously a year after his 1919 death). Registered per the credited-authorship-as-bright-line precedent: Core Canon = Baum's own 14 novels only. Ruth Plumly Thompson (and, later, John R. Neill, Jack Snow, and others) continued the series with an officially licensed further ~26 'Famous Forty' Oz books after Baum's death -- explicitly out of scope (a sprawling multi-author catalogue to register in a later pass rather than all at once); logged as a future candidate for a later pass. No formal literary award existed for children's fantasy in this era; this project's genre-historical-significance precedent (King of Elfland's Daughter, The Worm Ouroboros, Lud-in-the-Mist) applies -- Oz is a foundational work of American fantasy, adapted into the 1902 Broadway musical and the 1939 MGM film.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series The Oz Books: position 3 of 14: previous The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) · next Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908)
Sources
- Wikipedia: List of Oz books
- FantasticFiction: L. Frank Baum's Oz books in order
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozma_of_Oz
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.