Glinda of Oz

Glinda of Oz was published in 1920, one year after L. Frank Baum’s death, having been completed in draft form before his last illness. The book centers on a remote part of Oz that has not appeared before, the Skeezer and Flathead country in the far north. The two nations have been waging a long magical cold war against each other, and Princess Ozma decides Dorothy and Glinda should investigate before it turns violent.

The Skeezer queen Coo-ee-oh has built a magical glass-domed city that can submerge and surface inside an island lake. The Flathead leader Su-Dic has comparable powers. Dorothy and Ozma get trapped inside the submerged Skeezer dome partway through the book, which forces Glinda to mobilize a rescue party that essentially includes the entire Oz cast. The climactic sequence of raising the sunken dome and resolving the magical cold war is one of the more genuinely tense set-pieces in the series. As a posthumous conclusion to Baum’s run, it works better than such things usually do.