Customer Reviews

Magical Monarch of Mo

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am five years old and my grandma read me this book because she loved it when she was a little girl. It is my favouite book too because I love the names and the magic and the pictures.

This was one of my favorite books as a child and having recently reread it, I must say it works on an adult level as well. It's very imaginative and funny and shows what Baum could do when he let his imagination run away with him. I think it's better than any of the Oz books.

Dover edition does have color plates, in fact "all 15 of the full-page color plates and all of the more than 100 line drawings prepared by Frank Ver Beck for the first two editions [1900 and 1903]." This is a collection of 14 "surprises." But Mo, the land where these stories all take place, is like Oz in many ways. It is a land of enchantment where marvelous tings hapen, where people do not die, and where animals can talk. The landscape of Mo abounds in things children love to ear, and everything anyone wants grows from its trees. It was published (as A New Wonderland) the same year as the original Wizard of Oz.

The printing in the Amereon Edition of this book is poor. The pages look like faded xerox copies. This book contains no color plates, no dust jacket and is small in size. The book claims to be a limited edition. Well for a limited edition the four or so illustration plates are out of order and nowhere near the stories they belong to. If you want to buy this book, buy a better hardcover version. This book was copyrighted in 1903. It contains the roots of several ideas that really take off in Baum's OZ books. There are stories of changing heads, a large mechanical man and a little evil wizard guy who lives underground in a ruby mine ( a la the Nome King). However none of the stories comes close to the OZ tales. The one story in this book that keeps me from giving a rating of one star is "The Land Of Civilized Monkeys". Has the Baum family sued that French guy who wrote Planet Of The Apes? If not they should. How about a story where a young man lands from the sky into a civilization run by apes. He is roped and caged as a wild animal. He is put on display and examined by ape scientists as the possible "missing link" from which the apes descended. Sound familiar?? Baum wrote it in 1903 or so.

The 1899 publication of A NEW WONDERLAND was almost immediately routed by the 1900 publication of THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ--and so L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) re-wrote the book, which was re-published in 1903 as THE MAGICAL MONARCH OF MO. The book has no central plot; it is instead a collection of short stories about the Land of Mo, where almost everything is edible.

Needless to say, The Monarch of Mo figures in many of these tales. His head is bitten off by a purple dragon, he is pushed down into a hole by a naughty son, and he is forced to sort out the truth of various claims on several occasions. But the stories also encompass his various sons and daughters, such as the ill-tempered Princess Pattycake, who is wooed by the commoner Timtom, and the beautiful Princess Truella, whose big toe is stolen by an evil wizard for use in a magic potion. Other characters include the wise donkey, the three foolish wise men, a vicious gigaboo, the clever Prince Thinkabit, and many others. It is all very imaginative and very charming in a period sort of way.

Baum's novels tend to bleed over into each other, and readers will enjoy encountering such characters as an iron man and a talking hen, both of which would undergo adaptation and emerge in OZ stories as Tik-Tok and Billina, but parents who wish to read the stories aloud to children should be slightly forewarned. In some respects Baum was a naive man, and he seemed to have a talent for turning a phrase he considered harmless but which startles others. In MO the faux pas occurs in Chapter Twelve, wherein Prince Zingle is wafted by kite to a monkey kingdom and locked up in a zoo. After some consideration a monkey professor announces "I shall write an article on the creature and claim he is a Homo, and without doubt the paper will create a stir in the scientific world." No doubt, indeed!

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) became very famous a loved for his later books on Dorthy and Oz. This book written in 1903, and still delightful today, contains fourteen tales. Baum warns his readers that the stories are not true, "they could not be true and be so marvelous. No one is expected to believe them; they were meant to excite laughter and to gladden the heart."

The monarch of Mo is a king of average size who is "delightfully jolly when he is not sad, and seldom sad if he can possibly be jolly." He does not deal in magic, but "he leads such a queer life in such a queer country that his history will surely seem magical to us who inhabit civilized places." Why is there no map of the land of Mo? Because the map-makers did not know about the land, but the readers who read Baum's book will learn what they do not know, and will enjoy doing so.

Before we became familiar with a flying squirrel's adventures with a moronic moose, a wiseacre rabbit and his ill-tempered duck friend, and the comic tales of a talking mouse who launched an entertainment dynasty, Lyman Frank Baum told his sons and neighborhood children these tales of innocence and delightful nonsense in the 1890s which resulted in this book.

Originally titled ADVENTURES IN PHUNNYLAND (1896-four years before the WIZARD OF OZ) and then as A NEW WONDERLAND (1900), it re-emerged in 1903 as THE MAGICAL MONARCH OF MO (in part to capitalize upon THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ and it's success). Essentially, these are the whimsy-filled tales of a Monarch and his subjects in a fantasyland filled with wild irony and boundless imagination.

The good people of Mo deal with wicked rival kings, a robot monster (The Cast Iron Man) the momarch's ill-tmpered daughter (Princess Pattycake) among others. People literally lose their heads and other body parts in confrontations, but no fear, they somehow always manage to grow back. In another story, a donkey wanders into the local schoolhouse after classes and eats all of the books, thus making him "The Wise Donkey" whom the King uses as a confidant and oracle. The King's wooden head makes him rather "hard headed" while his talking dog becomes "quite a wag".

Incidentally, few have noticed that the tale "Timtom and Princess Pattycake" is in some ways a forerunner of the "Wizard of Oz", as Timtom's journey to win the hand of the Princess leads to adventures and characters just was wild as the more famous story.

On the whole, this book could have been a bunch of silly, sappy garbage of the Barney/New Zoo Review/Care Bears variety in the hands of a lesser writer. But Lyman Frank Baum fills these outrageous yarns with enough wit, imagination, and snappy prose to keep even the adult reader entertained over a century later. You will truly get the feel of being a child at Baum's house with his sons and their friends with lemonade and candy treats on a pleasant afternoon in 1896 as he regaled them with these lively and wonderful tales. Baum makes it clear introduction that these stories are not for those who did not keep their inner child alive. Be thankful that he wrote them down.

This is one of L. Frank Baum's earliest works. It's writing predate that of the WIZARD OF OZ but it was published the same year. It is not as polished a work but it is just as imaginative.

Mo is a kingdom near Oz. It is a happy place ruled by a happy king. It is full of magic features like root beer rivers and custard ponds. Every now and then, some minor trouble arises to keep things interesting. These involve wizards, dragons and rival kings. This book is a collection of short stories about some of these minor mishaps. They are all loosely related but each can be read without any of the others.

The stories are on a more juvenile level than the Oz stories but that does not keep them from being of interest. Baum indulges in his love of the ludicrous and for plays on words with great abandon all through the work.

It will most likely appeal to serious Oz fanatics and very young children.

This book was always at our home having been given to my mother by her mother in 1911 when my mom was 12 yrs old. I am now 61 yrs old and have read it to my children and grandchildren. From all the exciting adventures of the people of Mo and their unusual ways to Baum's originality and imagination, my listeners have been spellbound. I rate this book as more interesting to children and as creative as the "Wizard of Oz".

These stories are delightful in their quirky, darkly adventurous meanderings. A root beer river, a topsy turvy land where people live upside down, a king who loses his head and a nasty witch outwitted by a beautiful young princess? What child (or adult) wouldn't be drawn into the magical (truly!) land of Mo? I read and reread these stories when I was little, amazed by the wildly imaginative characters and playful settings. I'm surprised the previous reviewer had such a disappointing encounter with this childhood favorite of mine. I would strongly recommend it. I can't, however, attest to the quality of this particular edition as I own an older one.