There is a certain delight to seeing bad characters wallowing in being thoroughly bad, and in this book the many enemies who come together to help the Nome King destroy Oz are thoroughly evil in a businesslike fashion. It's not just their vocation, it's their avocation. There's nothing they'd rather do than make others miserable. One encounters this type of person from time to time in life, but rarely does one see it depicted with such honesty in literature.

The Nome King (previously defeated in Ozma of Oz) makes a reappearance, determined to conquer Oz. We find out his name: it's Roquat the Red. It's kind of like learning the name of the Cigarette-Smoking Man in The X-Files; it removes some of the mystique. Roquat is, after all, just a power-hungry war-mongering Nixon sort of dude and this time he sends his General Guph out to be Kissinger and get the rest of the bad-guy nations on board for his New World Order of Evil. There's the Whimsies, the Growleywogs, and the Phanfasms, and as we follow Guph through his travels we learn many valuable lessons for ourselves through learning about them: be who you are, might doesn't make right, and the beautiful, educated, powerful people are not always on the side of the angels.

In the parallel story, Dorothy finally gives up her secret-identity thing and decides to become a full-time Oz princess when the bank forecloses on Aunt Em and Uncle Henry's mortgage. Being a loving and responsible little girl, she also provides for her aging relatives by arranging for them to come live with her in the Land of Oz. They have a little trouble... adjusting.

This clash between the hard, realist Kansas farming couple and the fairyland of Oz provides some of the best dialogue I can remember from an Oz book. Auntie Em and Uncle Henry and Dorothy talk like regular folks, while the rest of Oz' citizens tend toward the formal or philosophical; the mix is very funny. At the same time, these encounters provide a lot of lessons valuable to students of any age. For instance: there is more water in the world than land; sometimes settling a quarrel is less fun than having the quarrel; and a great many bad puns can be made about talking cookware.

Cannibalism is bad
Auntie Em has the most trouble adjusting to this brave new world and her experiences are ones that any first-year college student can empathize with. She learns to take people as you find them, and also not to discusscooking or eating anyone that might be a relative of one of your traveling companions.

In fact, like an early modern explorer's narrative, the issue of cannibalism keeps coming up throughout the book. Billina, the talking hen, is shocked that anyone might think of any of her babies as broilers or fryers; however, they do permit their eggs to be eaten -- a fine philosophical distinction. Dorothy, hungry and lost, winds up in Bunbury, a town populated by baked goods -- and doesn't really blame Toto when he loses his head and eats several of the Crumpet children (by all accounts rather unpleasant children) and a Salt-Rising Biscuit who has apparently committed no crime. Dorothy and Billina, discussing their abrupt ejection from the town, seem more annoyed that the Bunburians didn't give them more to eat than they are chagrined about the little doggy murderer in their midst. And Jack Pumpkinhead, serving the travelers a feast of pumpkin pie in his pumpkin mansion, points out that he refrains from eating the pie not only because he isn't made to eat but also because that would make him a cannibal.