The Magic of Oz
core novel 1919 Oz
Record
| First published | 1919 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.88 (6,657 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781782263173 |
| Internal chronology | 13 |
Synopsis
In The Magic of Oz, a young Munchkin boy named Kiki Aru stumbles upon a secret magic word capable of transforming people and objects into anything he chooses, a power he does not fully understand how to control. Drawn into an alliance with the disgraced former Nome King Ruggedo, who has his own long-held grudge against Oz, Kiki agrees to help infiltrate the kingdom and raise an army of transformed wild animals to attack it from within. As the scheme takes shape largely unnoticed by Oz's rulers, the heroes of the kingdom, including familiar figures from earlier books, must piece together what is happening before the conspiracy can be set fully into motion.
Where it sits
- Universe: Oz
- Series: The Oz Books core; position 13 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 13 of 14: previous The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918) · next Glinda of Oz (1920)
Sources
- Wikipedia: List of Oz books
- FantasticFiction: L. Frank Baum's Oz books in order
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_of_Oz
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.