I can't believe it, but I am starting to get tired of the Oz books. I adored them as a child, but I mostly focused on my four or five favorites of them and never read through them all in order. So this one had some inventive parts ) but it sort of fizzles at the end. It's a good idea to have all the powerful magic in Oz get stolen, including Ozma, but there remains the powerful Magic Belt to step in again as Deus Ex Machina, once Dorothy overcomes her amnesia about how to use it. (The fact that she could use it perfectly well in Ozma of Oz is never explained.) The satire on the puffed-up Frogman doesn't go anywhere -- he goes through some nice moral quandaries, but no one else pays much attention. Button-Bright is annoying. The repentance of Ugu at the end is unconvincing.

Supposedly Ozma and Glinda are good rulers who care about their people, but then there are things like a town full of people who enslave others (giants) and treat them cruelly, throwing them out the window with their super strength ... and the travelers who are looking for the stolen Ozma don't bat an eye at this.

Three more to go. I think Glinda, the last book, was my favorite of these. Let's see if it holds up at all.