Oz Universe

Past a deadly desert that turns living flesh to sand lies a small square country no honest map will admit exists. Come by cyclone, by shipwreck, by an earthquake's crack or a wrong turn off a Kansas road, and you arrive in Oz — a fairyland where nobody grows old and nobody quite stays dead, where a girl from the prairie can be nothing in particular and still put a wicked witch out of business before supper. It is the New World's own fairy tale: no brooding princes, a great deal of pluck, and a scarecrow, a tin man, and a cowardly lion who between them prove wiser and braver and kinder than most folk with proper insides. L. Frank Baum opened the gate in 1900 and walked through it fourteen times, from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to Glinda of Oz. When he died the country did not close. The publisher named a succession of Royal Historians — Ruth Plumly Thompson, who wrote nearly twenty; the illustrator John R. Neill; Jack Snow, Rachel Cosgrove, Eloise Jarvis McGraw — and those forty books stand as the old canon. Past them the map only widens: small presses and the Oz clubs have added continuations for a century (March Laumer, Marcus Mebes); Alexander Volkov carried Oz into Russian as the Emerald City books; and Gregory Maguire's Wicked Years walked back in to ask what the witch was really guilty of. The tone stays plain, sunny, and matter-of-fact about marvels — cruelty is rare and swiftly mended, invention is bottomless, each book unpacking a fresh crop of odd little peoples. Begin where Dorothy did, with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, then follow Baum's thirteen further volumes in order; the Royal Historians reward sampling once the road feels like home, and Maguire's Wicked is the side door for grown readers who want the shadows drawn out.