Customer Reviews

Lucky Bucky in Oz

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I just finished rereading Lucky Bucky and found myself laughing throughout the text. Neill does not write as tight a story as L. Frank Baum, but he does create characters as delightful as any developed by Ruth Plumly Thompson. Davy Jones, the wooden whale who befriends Bucky Jones and starts him on his quest, is one of the best. As with all Oz stories, getting there is all the fun. Bucky and Davy have a great time and so will you. Neill was the illustrator of Oz books for 40 years and this book contains the last views that he gave us of this magical land. If you love reading Oz books, this one will not disappoint you. From the Volcano Bakery to the Emerald City, go along for the ride. You won't regret it.

This is the only Oz book I've ever read, so, unlike some of the reviewers, I can't compare it to either Baum's or the other authors'. I remember picking up an old tattered hardback from my Grandmothers' shelves when I was about twelve. The book itself wasn't that memorable, and I seem to recall that it ran out of steam by the time the travelers actually reached the Emerald City. Still, I recall reading in facination how Bucky got to Oz (blown through the air by and exploding boiler) and in creepy horror as he and Davy Jones were swept down the underground river and into the kingdom of the gnomes. For these scenes alone. The version I read was also wonderfully illustrated. For these reasons alone, this book has a special place in my heart.

This book haunted me from age 5. The first 70 pages are among the best in Oz. A pleasure.

I was 10 yrs. old when I read this book. I gave it a D- at the time, comparing it with the books of Baum and Thompson; these books generally received A's and B's. It appeared to be a book for much younger readers than the earlier Oz books.

Lucky Bucky In Oz makes it clear that R. Neill's forte as an Oz author was in dramatizing the personal relationships of the Oz royal family; whenever Neill's settings and plot are relatively homey and contained, he excels. His weakness was in attempting to create the sprawling adventures that most of the titles in the Oz chronicle seem to require. Neill had a talent for forward motion, but almost none for driving home a narrative that relies upon scope, invention, and cliff-hanging suspense to sustain itself. As a result, Lucky Bucky In Oz suffers from the same illness that plagued Neill's second title, The Scalawagons Of Oz, which is unfortunate, since his The Wonder City Of Oz is one of the classics in the series.

Caught in a tugboat explosion in New York Harbor, young lad Lucky Bucky is pitched high into the stratosphere, eventually landing safely on a volcanic island in the pink sea that borders Ev, the land next to Oz. Rescued by Davy Jones, a living wooden whale who doubles as a ship, the two new friends decide to travel together to Oz and the Emerald City. Their journey is one of the dullest of several dull journeys which occur in the series; a wooden whale in a desert environment does not portend excellent things ahead, or even suggest good creative sense. Readers are asked to accept that for much of the story the legless Davy makes his way forward over dusty, dry land by slowly "wiggling."

Throughout the book, Neill creates situations and occasionally whole chapters that are calculated to come to great effect, but which fall flat in every instance. Four notorious Oz witches, a warlock, and twenty Little Wizard simulacrums escape from a magically painted mural in the Emerald Kingdom, but all are dispatched within a few paragraphs. Lone escapee and classic Oz character Old Mombi flies across Oz and Ev in searching of a hiding place, deciding at last to seek cover under a bed inside the wooden whale. For the greater part of the book, Mombi clearly remains forgotten by the author but not by the reader, who will desperately plead that she get out from under the bunk, jump about, and cause at least some general mayhem (finally remembered at the end, she is corralled by Ozma and Glinda within a matter of seconds, having done no real harm whatsoever). Later, the exhausted Davy sinks in Quad Lake with the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and 100 rambunctious ` uncles ' on board, but within a page the whale and everyone else has made their way safely to shore. When Bucky and Davy find themselves trapped in the underground kingdom of the Gnomes, Number Nine jumps through the Little Wizard's magic mirror machine and frees them before anything exciting can happen.

Down the road, lad and whale visit the Scarecrow's Corncob Castle, Oz's largest phallic symbol, but nothing much occurs except a prosaic meeting with the owner and the Tin Woodman. Like Baum, Neill fails to draw inspiration from the role nature plays in his character's lives, reminding readers that bountiful, waves - of - grain Oz is no Arcadia. The Scarecrow's castle appropriately lies among endless corn fields in the yellow Winkie country, but the majestic corn fields get a mere mention, and may as well not even exist; they do not emanate, reverberate, or breathe. As a romantically - conceived fairyland, Baum's Oz was in fact in all ways too far removed from nature and its influence. Thus Baum's Oz, while poetically imagined, has a mild sub - soil of rot and decadence under its candy-dipped veneer.

Tom, Dick, Harry, and Flummox Gabooch, the family of wind-blowing artificial birds that accompany Bucky and Davy on their journey, are obnoxious, tiresome, and creatively impoverished. Impressive Munchkin boy Number Nine plays a significant role in the story, but since he is almost indistinguishable from Bucky in every way, his inclusion only dilutes the already insubstantial plot. Bucky mentions Bible story Jonah and the Whale twice, but his relationship to Davy has no genuinely archetypal underpinnings. In terms of adventure and opposition, Bucky and Davy are anemically forced to confront and battle a river of talking bubbles, and later, a plain of hostile thigh bones. Guest appearances by Glinda, the Little Wizard, Jenny Jump, Ozma, Dorothy, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, and Jack Pumpkinhead fail to bring fire, energy, or color to the story.

Lucky Bucky In Oz, a book readers will want to like, is nonetheless one of the few titles in the series in which readers will feel the desire to skip pages or whole chapters to relieve the drudgery. An unimaginative and poorly conceived failure, the book reads more like a first draft than a finished manuscript, and as such, makes it impossible for the reader to suspend disbelief or becoming enthusiastically involved in its story. Neill's art is not particularly inspired, except several illustrations of Bucky in which he resembles a jaunty Peter Pan.