Eh, Baum created stories based on Mother Goose rhymes. Some are more successful than others but overall, it didn't seem all that charming.

Baum's first published set of fantasy stories is, to be perfectly honest, pretty thin stuff. Purporting to reveal the untold tales behind the famous Mother Goose rhymes, Baum manages to - at least half the time - tell terribly literal little vignettes that any bright child could have guessed at anyway. Little Boy Blue was a shepherd boy who fell asleep? What a shock. Jack Horner's good behavior was rewarded with a plum pie? I declare. With revelations like these, I might just fall asleep.

Thankfully, as the book goes on, Baum starts to revel a little bit more in the fantasy logic he would later employ in the Oz stories. "Old King Cole" sees a bizarre law make a beggar into a king, anticipating Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix, and the explanation behind the eponymous building of "The Woman Who Lived in a Shoe" is really quite clever. Best of all, probably, is "Humpty Dumpty," where Baum delights in the visual of eggs getting up and going on adventures all by themselves. Even that story, however, is cut off just as it starts to get interesting, and you end up with the feeling that Baum is hampered, not helped, by the existing Mother Goose verses - many of which, it should be noted, are presented in slightly more Victorian wording than we are used to today.

I think it's reasonable to say that aside from its basic historical interest, Mother Goose in Prose serves mostly now as a prime example of why Baum was wise to move beyond the European fairy tale tradition. The moralizing seen in several stories here (reaching its nadir, probably, in "How the Beggars Came to Town") and in some of Baum's other early works - including The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - eventually gives way to a much freer and more distinctly American form of fantasy story, where the emphasis is on showmanship, adventure and invention as opposed to lessons and traditional themes. L. Frank Baum was probably never a truly great writer - not in the sense of someone who has great command over the intricacies of his written language - but he was one of the very finest storytellers ever published, and this book, more than any other, proves that he needed the full range of a blank canvas to really let his imagination flourish. ( )