Sky Island: Being the
Further Adventures of Trot and Cap'n Bill after Their Visit to the Sea Fairies is
a children's fantasy novel
written by L. Frank Baum,
illustrated by John R. Neill,
and published in 1912 by the Reilly
& Britton Company—the same constellation of
forces that produced the
Oz books in the first decades of the twentieth century.
As the full title
indicates, Sky Island is a sequel to Baum's The
Sea Fairies of 1911. Both books were intended as
parts of a projected long-running fantasy series to replace the Oz books. Given
the relatively tepid reception of the first book in the series, however, Baum
tried to attract young readers by including two characters from his Oz mythos in Sky
Island—Button-Bright and Polychrome,
originally introduced in The
Road to Oz (1909).
Despite the inclusion of
Ozite characters, and even though it is, in the judgment of some critics,
"far superior" to its predecessor, Sky Island sold
even fewer copies in its first year than The Sea Fairies had;
11,750 copies of Sky Island were sold in 1912. Baum attempted
to launch two other juvenile novel series in the same 1911–12 period, The
Flying Girl and The
Daring Twins, neither of which was a long-term success.
Disappointing sales inspired Baum and Reilly & Britton to view a return to
Oz as an obvious and necessary step, leading to the publication of The Patchwork Girl of Oz and
the Little Wizard Stories of Oz the
next year, 1913. In 1918, however, Baum wrote that he thought Sky
Island would probably be remembered as his best work. – Wikipedia.
This Dover reprint is 288 pages long.
No comments:
Post a Comment