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Sky Island / Being the further exciting adventures of Trot and Cap'n Bill after their visit to the sea fairies by Baum, L. Frank (Lyman Frank) ( Author )
Lemonjar
Reilly & Britton
01-01-1988
Click "free sample" to read the whole book no need to purchase.Trot, a little girl who lives on the coast of southern California, meets a strange little boy with a large umbrella. Button Bright has been using his family's magic umbrella to take long-range journeys from his Philadelphia home, and has gotten as far as California. After an explanation of how the magic umbrella works, the two children, joined by Cap'n Bill, decide to take a trip to a nearby island; they call it "Sky island," because it looks like it's "halfway in the sky"—but the umbrella takes them to a different place entirely, a literal island in the sky. Sky Island is another split-color country in Baum's fantasy universe, like the Land of Oz. Divided in halves, blue and pink, Sky Island supports two separate races of beings, the Blues (or "Blueskins") and the Pinkies. The two halves are separated by a region shrouded in fog, which both peoples are reluctant to enter. The three travellers land on the blue side of Sky Island, which is a grim country ruled by a sadistic tyrant, the Boolooroo of the Blues. In Sky Island, as in Oz, no one can be killed or suffer pain, but that doesn't mean one is safe: the Boolooroo's method of punishing disobedience in his subjects is to slice two of his victims into halves using a huge guillotine-type knife, and then join the wrong halves back together, creating very unhappy asymmetrical mixed people. This is called "patching." The Boolooroo threatens to do the same to his new visitors; meanwhile he steals the magic umbrella, keeps the visitors imprisoned, and gives Trot as a slave to his daughters, the Six Snubnosed Princesses (named Cerulia, Turquoise, Sapphire, Azure, Cobalt, and Indigo). The three protagonists manage to escape from the Blues; penetrating the Great Fog Bank that separates the island's halves and meeting its strange inhabitants, they reach the pink side of the island. The Pink Country is a much friendlier and more relaxed place than the blue side, with cheerful residents. In contrast with the Blues, the Pinkies are ruled by a queen, who is required by law to live very modestly, in poverty, in order to assure that her authority to rule will not cause her to become arrogant. The visitors get a better reception, since they are rather pink in color themselves, albeit of a sadly wan and pale shade. Unfortunately, however, the laws of the Pink Country regarding strangers are ambiguous, and the Pinkies interpret them to require that all strangers must be thrown off the edge of Sky Island. At the edge of the island, just as the Pinkies are about to fulfill the law, Polychrome, the daughter of the rainbow who already knows Button Bright from The Road to Oz, descends from the rainbow to rescue him and his friends. She helps Tormaline, the Queen of the Pinkies, to re-interpret the law in a way which allows the strangers to stay. Polychrome also discovers another quirk in the Pinkies' law: whichever person in the kingdom who has the lightest skin shall be Queen. Since Trot's skin is paler than Tormaline's, Trot becomes Queen of the Pinkies. (Tormaline is delighted to yield to Trot and become an ordinary citizen free from the requirement of poverty).
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epub
998.53 KB
English
Language and Literature Literature (General)
MYR 0.01
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