Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz

The twenty-third entry in the Oz series and the ninth written by Ruth Plumly Thompson, the inheritor of the series after L. Frank Baum’s passing, Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz (1929) features everything an Oz reader could want: a journey to the Emerald City, strange inhabitants with even stranger predicaments, and magic items that never fail to save the day in unexpected ways.

Peter Brown, a Philadelphia-born boy first introduced in The Gnome King of Oz (1927), finds himself intolerably bored on a rainy day. With no baseball to be played, he holes up in his attic and, while perusing the sack of gold coins gleaned from his last journey to Oz, notices one of the coins is different from the rest. When he rubs the odd coin and thinks of the Land of Oz, he suddenly finds himself transported back, haphazardly placed in the backyard of the titular Jack Pumpkinhead. Jack agrees to take him to the Emerald City, and along the way the two meet many strange characters, most notably the friendly yet discouraged Snif the Iffin, a griffin who has lost his “gr-” and can no longer growl. With the help of Jack, Snif, and many other strange characters, Peter does his darndest to settle local disputes while making his way back to the Wizard of Oz, his only way back home.

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