It feels rather silly to review Oz books--they're mostly just fluff, after all. That said, this one isn't one of my favorites, maybe because the new character introduced, Kiki Aru, is a boy. Baum's boy characters are uniformly either dull or sullen, with the exception of one who's actually a girl in disguise), so following him from one disastrous mistake to another becomes annoying, and it's a relief when he's turned into a hazelnut about 75% of the way through and pretty much forgotten until the end of the book (no kidding!)