Introduction

There is a particular kind of magic that belongs to the storyteller who refuses to let go of wonder. Some authors write a single great book and spend the rest of their lives trying to recapture the lightning they once caught in a bottle. Others, rarer and more generous, seem to live inside an endless wellspring of invention, returning again and again to the worlds they have made and finding in them not exhaustion but fresh delight. L. Frank Baum belonged unmistakably to this second kind. He was a man who could not stop dreaming, and in Sky Island he gives us one of his most exuberant, most colorful, and most quietly courageous dreams of all.

Published in 1912, Sky Island arrived at the height of Baum’s powers, written by an author who had already given the world the immortal land of Oz and who had discovered that his imagination was far too large to be contained by any single map. It is a book that floats, quite literally, above the ordinary concerns of children’s literature. It rises into the clouds, into a kingdom suspended between earth and heaven, and it carries with it a cast of characters so vivid, so stubborn, and so wonderfully alive that they continue to charm readers more than a century after they first took flight. This modern translation, prepared and adapted for the contemporary reader, has been crafted with the intention of preserving everything that makes the original sparkle while gently smoothing the passages that time has rendered unfamiliar, so that today’s reader may step into Baum’s cloud kingdoms with the same uncomplicated joy that greeted the book’s first audiences.

To open this book is to accept an invitation into a place where the impossible is not merely possible but routine, where umbrellas can carry travelers into the sky, where entire nations are organized by color, and where a young girl’s bravery proves to be the most powerful force in any realm, whether it floats among the clouds or rests upon solid ground. What follows in these pages is not a grim or weighty tale. It is an adventure, bright and buoyant, and yet beneath its glittering surface there runs a current of genuine wisdom about courage, friendship, fairness, and the strange and lovely business of finding your footing in a world that does not always make sense.

To understand why Sky Island delights as it does, it helps to understand the man who wrote it and the gentle revolution he brought to storytelling. Lyman Frank Baum was born in 1856 in Chittenango, New York, into a family of considerable means. His was not a straight or easy path to literary immortality. Before he ever wrote the words that would make him famous, Baum tried his hand at an extraordinary number of trades and ventures. He raised fancy poultry and wrote about it. He acted on the stage and managed theaters. He ran a variety store on the American frontier in South Dakota, where he extended so much credit to struggling neighbors that the business eventually collapsed. He edited a small-town newspaper. He sold china and glassware as a traveling salesman. He dabbled in window dressing and even published a trade journal on the art of decorating shop windows. In nearly every endeavor he revealed the same restless, generous, imaginative spirit, and in nearly every endeavor he struggled to make ends meet.

What carried Baum through these uncertain years, and what ultimately found its truest expression, was his gift for telling stories to children. He had married Maud Gage, the strong-willed daughter of the famous women’s suffrage activist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and the couple raised four sons. It was for children, and partly because of the influence of his mother-in-law’s fierce belief in the dignity and capability of girls and women, that Baum eventually found his calling. He began writing down the tales he had been spinning aloud, and in 1900 he published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a book that would change American children’s literature forever.

Baum had a theory about what stories for children ought to be, and he stated it plainly. He wanted to write a “modernized fairy tale,” one that kept the wonder and the marvel of the old European tales but stripped away their cruelty, their heavy moralizing, and their frequently terrifying punishments. The fairy tales he had grown up with were often dark, full of children boiled and eaten, wicked figures dancing to death in red-hot shoes, and lessons delivered through fear. Baum wanted something different. He wanted stories in which wonder existed for its own sake, in which kindness was rewarded and bravery celebrated, and in which a child reader could lose themselves in delight rather than be frightened into obedience. He wanted to keep the nightmares out and let the dreams flow freely.

This philosophy is everywhere in Sky Island, and it is part of what makes the book feel so refreshing even now. There is conflict here, and there is danger, but the tone never curdles into menace. Baum understood that children are perfectly capable of recognizing injustice and rooting against it, and that they do not need to be traumatized in order to be taught. The villainy in his books tends to be more foolish than fearsome, more vain and petty than genuinely evil, and the triumph of his heroes comes not through violence but through cleverness, kindness, and an unshakable sense of fairness. The result is a kind of storytelling that nourishes rather than merely entertains.

It is worth noting, too, that Baum was writing during a remarkable period of American history, the early years of the twentieth century, when the country was buzzing with new inventions, new ideas, and a sense of boundless possibility. Airplanes had only just begun to fly. Electricity was transforming cities. The frontier was closing and the modern age was opening. Baum’s fantasies, for all their fairy-tale trappings, are shot through with this distinctly modern optimism, this faith that wonder and progress might walk hand in hand. His marvelous mechanisms and his floating kingdoms feel less like the dusty enchantments of old Europe and more like the bright inventions of a new world that had not yet decided what it might become.

By the time he wrote Sky Island, Baum was a beloved and successful author, but he was also a man who had grown somewhat weary of being chained to a single creation. He had tried, more than once, to write his way out of the land of Oz, only to be drawn back by the affectionate demands of his young readers, who wrote him letters begging for more. Sky Island belongs to a small and special group of Baum’s fantasies that exist alongside the Oz books, sharing some of their characters and some of their geography while charting their own independent course. It is connected to that larger universe and yet stands wonderfully on its own, a complete and self-contained adventure that requires no prior acquaintance to be thoroughly enjoyed.

The premise of Sky Island is one of those gloriously simple ideas that opens up into endless possibility. Take an ordinary object, an everyday umbrella, and give it a single extraordinary property, and suddenly the whole sky becomes a frontier waiting to be explored. From this small spark Baum builds an entire civilization, a kingdom suspended high above the earth where no human foot was ever meant to tread. It is the kind of imaginative leap that seems obvious only after someone has made it, and Baum makes it with such effortless confidence that we accept the impossible at once.

What makes the sky kingdom so memorable is not merely that it floats but the way Baum organizes it. He divides his cloud world by color, and in doing so he creates one of the most visually striking settings in all of children’s literature. Color is not a mere decoration in this book. It is the very fabric of society, the principle by which an entire people order their lives, define their loyalties, and understand the world. The inhabitants of one region live amid a single hue, surrounded by it, dressed in it, eating it, seeing the world through it, while their neighbors live according to a different shade and regard the others with suspicion bordering on hostility. The boundary between these realms, and what lies along it, gives the story much of its tension and a good deal of its wit.

This conceit allows Baum to do something subtly clever beneath the surface of his entertainment. By inventing peoples who judge one another, who divide themselves, and who maintain old grievances on the basis of nothing more substantial than the color that happens to surround them, he holds up a gentle mirror to the readers’ own world without ever lecturing or moralizing. The reader, particularly the young reader, can see for themselves how absurd it is to dislike someone for so superficial a reason. The lesson lands all the more firmly because it is never stated as a lesson. It is simply lived, observed, and laughed at, and the laughter does the work that a sermon never could.

The visual imagination at play here deserves particular admiration. Baum was, after all, a man who had professionally studied the art of window display, the craft of arranging color and shape to catch the eye and stir the heart. That sensibility runs all through Sky Island. The book is a feast for the mind’s eye, a procession of vivid tableaux, fantastical costumes, peculiar customs, and strange and beautiful landscapes that seem designed to be seen as much as read. There is a painterly quality to Baum’s invention, a delight in spectacle, that makes the cloud kingdoms shimmer in the imagination long after the book is closed.

And yet for all its visual splendor, the sky world is more than a pretty backdrop. Baum populates it with a society that has politics, history, rivalries, and rules, some of them sensible and many of them gloriously ridiculous. He has great fun with bureaucracy, with the pomposity of officials, with the silly ceremonies and self-important pronouncements of those who hold power. There is a streak of sly humor running through every encounter, a knowing wink at the foolishness of the grown-up world, that adults reading the book aloud will appreciate as much as the children listening. Baum never talks down to his audience. He trusts them to catch the joke, and he rewards that trust on nearly every page.

The mechanics of how one arrives in such a place, how one might survive there, and what perils and wonders await are best left for the reader to discover firsthand. Part of the great pleasure of Sky Island lies in the steady unfolding of its surprises, the way each new region reveals fresh marvels and the way the rules of this floating world gradually become clear. To say too much would be to dim the delight. It is enough to know that the journey is full of incident, that the dangers are real enough to thrill without being so dire as to distress, and that the destination is more than worth the trouble of getting there.

Brave Girls and the Heart of the Adventure

If there is one quality that distinguishes Baum’s work from much of the children’s literature of his era, and indeed from a good deal of what came after, it is his abiding faith in the courage and capability of girls. This was not accidental. Baum’s mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was one of the great figures of the American women’s suffrage movement, a woman of formidable intellect and conviction who lived for a time in the Baum household and whose influence on her son-in-law was profound. Through her, and through his own evident sympathies, Baum absorbed a belief that was genuinely radical for his time: that girls could be heroes, that they could lead, that they could think and act and triumph on their own terms, and that they did not need to be rescued so much as they needed the freedom to do the rescuing themselves.

The heroines of Sky Island embody this conviction beautifully. They are not passive ornaments waiting to be carried along by the plot. They are active, clever, determined, and brave. When they are confronted with difficulty, they do not faint or weep helplessly. They think. They argue. They stand up for themselves and for what is right. They make mistakes, learn from them, and press on. Faced with rulers and rules they find unjust, they do not simply submit. They question, they resist, and ultimately they bring about change through a combination of courage, cleverness, and an unwavering moral compass.