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saroz162's review
4.0
I probably first read this book when I was seven or eight years old, when it was my great fortune that Dover reprinted several of L. Frank Baum's non-Oz fantasies in easy-to-afford paperback editions. Although this wasn't my favorite of the bunch, I always liked The Magical Monarch of Mo, and I'm pleased to find out - twenty-five years later - that I still find it very enjoyable. These stories find Baum in transition as a storyteller; they were originally published as A New Wonderland in 1900, and they were slightly revised and reprinted as Mo in 1903. Consequently, they show a stage of Baum's evolution that clearly predates The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; he's playing, here, with established European fairy tale figures and motifs (princes, princesses, dragons, giants, and so on) and just barely turning them on their head. It's not as significant, nor as Americanized, a shift as the "fairy tale" he creates with Wizard, but it's far more Baum's own thing than his 1896 Mother Goose in Prose. There's a very pleasing amount of his punning humor and pragmatic magical logic in The Magical Monarch of Mo - enough, in fact, that you can clearly identify this as writing by the far more famous and individually styled author of almost twenty years later.
Of the fourteen "surprises" (not all of which are really long enough or deep enough to qualify as individual stories), some are quite forgettable, while one or two probably could have been left out to the book's benefit. The best of them, though, are marvelously nonsensical: the adventure of the King's missing head, the Prince's fight against the Gigaboo, and the fight with the Purple Dragon. Any one of these show off the great potential Baum had at that moment in time, which he would soon find a way to transmit directly into his own, distinctly American fairy stories of Oz.
Of the fourteen "surprises" (not all of which are really long enough or deep enough to qualify as individual stories), some are quite forgettable, while one or two probably could have been left out to the book's benefit. The best of them, though, are marvelously nonsensical: the adventure of the King's missing head, the Prince's fight against the Gigaboo, and the fight with the Purple Dragon. Any one of these show off the great potential Baum had at that moment in time, which he would soon find a way to transmit directly into his own, distinctly American fairy stories of Oz.
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