The seventh Oz book is not the best in the series. It started off very promisingly, with a completely new cast of characters. The boy, Ojo the Unlucky, and his Uncle Nunkie visit the Crooked Magician, who has created a Patchwork Girl to be a servant. However, things go spectacularly wrong when she is sprinkled with the Powder of Life and Ojo goes on a quest to fix them, with companions including the conceited Glass Cat and the Patchwork Girl herself, named Scraps. What I didn’t like about the book was that the story became formulaic, with the powerful magic of Princess Ozma putting everything to rights, making you wonder what the quest was for. There was the radium mine, this at the time when radium was thought to be wonderful, but its inclusion in a fairytale is strange. I also thought most of the illustrations of Scraps rather ugly and frightening. I quite liked the chapter when she and the Scarecrow met and romance seemed to be in the air (illustration below). I do think this book is charming and inventive as always but it’s not as good as the earlier ones.

Published in 1913, illustrated by John R Neill. I read this copy from Project Gutenberg.