Fairy Tale Spotlight: The Hidden Prince of Oz [Book Review]

[This blog has spoilers for a book that nobody reads anymore.]

"The Hidden Prince of Oz" is the fifty-first book in the Oz book series created by L. Frank Baum. It was written by Gina Wickwar and published in 2000, which is 100 years after the very first Oz book was published. Unfortunately, this one has some problems.

I'll be honest here; I haven't really been looking forward to writing this. I guess I am supposed to explain the story and tell about the characters in it, but this gives me a lot of stress. The main problem with the story is that there are too many characters involved, and many of them are original characters that have never been seen before.

There are actually about three different stories happening at one time that all converge, and each story has a lot of characters involved. It gets very hard to keep track of everyone. The main plot, I suppose is the mystery of a prince that disappeared 101 years ago that was supposed to marry the princess of Silica, a place made of glass. That's cool and everything, but the amount of complications pushed in this story really muddle that plot up.

Among the people trying to solve this problem is Beak the bird, Penny a teacup wearing puppy, Paddy the leprechaun, Ketzal a feathered boa, Vitrea the princess of Silica (and two others from Silica), a giant pigeon, Emma Lu a girl from Arizona, Thundercloud a living wooden Indian, Bungle the Glass Cat of Oz, an actual walking and talking bridge, Polychrome the rainbow's daughter, the Sawhorse,  The Tin Woodman, and eventually Ozma, Dorothy, and the Wizard. And yes, I probably forgot somebody. I'm sorry. My brain can only handle so much.

The story does have a villain. His name is Vitriol, and I actually really liked him. He was an archetypical villainous old man who is trying to gain power. His illustrations were fun to look at too. He kind of looked like Count Olaf from the Lemony Snicket stories. His villainy was amusing, but he was never particularly funny. He was just very greedy and dastardly.

There was one part in the story where all the characters come together and even they are a bit overwhelmed that there are so many people involved. The author had trouble making characters stand out. Like Ketzal! She was a very interesting snake character that was very flirtatious and friendly, but after her initial introduction, you are lucky to get one single line out of her! This is happening because the author has too many characters to worry about in a single scene, and so it makes me feel like most of the characters are just standing around and not doing anything while the author focuses on more important people in the scene. Half the time I forget they are actually there until they suddenly have one single line of dialog to remind me that they still exist.

Anna-Maria Cool did the illustrations for this one. It honestly has a Scooby Doo vibe. I liked them a lot. Reminded me of all those cartoons I used to watch growing up. No problems there at all.

There was also a fairly scary scene that had to do with an actual "babbling brook" that carried some of the characters off while shouting gibberish in their ears. This led to a literal screaming waterfall. It was so traumatic to the characters that some of them ended up crying.

"The Hidden Prince of Oz" is a hard one too recommend, so I won't do it. This was also an annoying review to write. I really wish it had not been so overrun with characters. It was just too much. A genuinely interesting story was basically buried in characters that you can never truly relate to because they are all too often much too difficult to see in the crowd.

This blog was written on September 7, 2023.

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