Refugees From The Emerald City

I loved the Oz books as a kid. Baum's tales about Dorothy traveling to the Emerald City to get home after killing the Wicked Witch (I imagine that wasn't good for the Witch). But in his lifetime he wrote thirteen more books set in Oz besides The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and in one of them the Emerald City misses being invaded and conquered by the diminutive, immortal Nomes. In one world. In Florida, my former classmate Jamie and I found out this was truer than we wanted to believe, and an elaborate spin campaign kept the truth from us. And of course, we ended up, with the help of the story characters tasked to set it “right” …