The Patchwork Girl of Oz

The Patchwork Girl of Oz – L. Frank Baum

This is the seventh book of the Oz series. The Patchwork Girl is one of the most delightful of the stories. The most important new character is Miss Scraps Patches, the patchwork girl herself, who is only a large stuffed doll, but very much alive thanks to the magic Powder of Life, and very brainy, because her stuffing has been well dosed with a part of the contents of all the bottles on the shelf labeled “Brain Furniture” . Then there is the Woozy, a strange little animal “all squares and flat surfaces and edges”, who isn’t very important except for the three hairs at the end of his tail; his only talent is his fire-flashing eyes. Another unusual creation is Bungle, a glass cat, who is completely transparent and quite conceited because of her pink brains: “You can see ’em work.

The Patchwork Girl of Oz

The Patchwork Girl of Oz

Format: Paperback.

The Patchwork Girl of Oz.

ISBN: 9783849692346

Available at amazon.com and other venues.

 

Plot of The Patchwork Girl of Oz (from Wikipedia):

Ojo the very unlucky is a young Munchkin boy who, devoted to life with his uncle Unc Nunkie in the wilderness but on the verge of starvation, goes to see a neighboring “magician” and old friend of Unc, Dr. Pipt. While there they see a demonstration of the Pipt-made Powder of Life, which animates any object it touches after saying the magic words. Dr.pipt’s wife has transformed an unsightly patchwork quilt into a patchwork servant and carefully prepared its brains for it to be an obedient unquestioning servant. Ojo, however, messes around with the ingredients for the brains, and the patchwork girl comes to life as a madcap, poetry-spouting, acrobatic creature. In flinging about, she knocks over a bottle of Liquid of Petrification. Unc Nunkie and Dr. Pipt’s wife are thus the sufferers of the consequences of another of the Doctor’s inventions, the Liquid of Petrifaction, which turns them into solid marble statues.

The remainder of this book is Ojo’s quest through Oz to collect the five components of an antidote to the Liquid: a six-leaved clover found only in the Emerald City, three hairs from the tip of a Woozy’s tail, a gill (a quarter of a pint) of water from a dark well (one that remains untouched by natural light), a drop of oil from a live man’s body, and the left wing of a yellow butterfly. With the help of the life-size patchwork doll named Scraps, Bungle the snobbish Glass Cat (another of Dr. Pipt’s creations), the Woozy, Dorothy, the Shaggy Man, and the Scarecrow, Ojo gathers all of these supplies but the left wing – the Tin Woodman, who rules the yellow Winkie Country, which is the only place where yellow butterflies grow, will not allow any living thing to be killed, even to save another’s life.

The party returns to the Emerald City, where the Wizard of Oz (one of the few allowed to lawfully practice magic in Oz) uses his own magic to restore Unc Nunkie and Dr. Pipt’s wife. (the whole quest for the ingredients of the antidote, foredoomed to failure, turns out to be an excuse for a Oz travelog, as the Deus Ex Machina of the Wizard rendered it un-necessary)The story is also a growth process for Ojo; he learns that luck is not a matter of who you are or what you have, but what you do; he is renamed “Ojo the Lucky,” and so he appears in the following Oz books.

 

(The text of the last section was taken from a Wikipedia entry and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)

 

Publisher’s Note: This book is printed and distributed by Createspace a DBA of On-Demand Publishing LLC and is typically not available anywhere else than in stores owned and operated by Amazon or Createspace.

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