It is interesting to note that in both the Oz series and Sherlock Holmes, written around the same time, the authors made it as clear as they could that they really wanted nothing to do with their most popular franchises, but their fans wouldn't leave them alone. Arthur Conan Doyle, though, managed to keep up the quality in the later works, while 'phoning it in' is probably too generous a term for Baum.

While the last quarter of the book is just a mess of nonsense that isn't even worth criticizing, the rest of it was mostly ok; the new characters were interesting and memorable (though I can't believe that, even given how long ago it was written, people didn't have some terrible suspicions about the motives of the Shaggy Man) and the adventures were in the typical Oz style, but not particularly good examples of it.