Books like The Road to Oz

A shaggy-looking guy called Shaggy Man asked Dorothy for directions; the latter trying to show the right road completely lost her way and the pair ended up in a magical land - not Oz, but somewhere close to it geographically. Their decided to proceed to Oz instead of going back to Kansas. By doing so they met a lot of magical creatures and saw a lot of magical countries. In the review of a previous book of the series I mentioned that L. Frank Baum had great imagination which was clearly demonstrated by the different magical creatures living in Oz and around. This time the creatures in question were so much out of this world that I began to suspect Baum's imagination was helped by some drugs: I mean mind-altering kind, and not weak ones either. I have yet to see such bizarre creatures anywhere else. This is one of the reasons I keep reading the series by the way. It is curious to see that only one hundred years ago it was perfectly normal for a grown-up man to ask an unattended young girl for directions without being accused of pedophilia. It was also perfectly normal for a said young girl to play outside without any supervision. While the magical creatures are great the same cannot be said about Dorothy's travelling companions. Shaggy Man is probably the best one, but he remains undeveloped even for a children book. I could not help thinking about this guy: Button Bright comes out like a complete retard even considering his age. The guy who only says, "I don't know" may sound cute first couple of hundred times, but after this it becomes really old really fast. Besides, a child travelling with strangers for a number of days and never mentioning his parents (children psychology is wired to constantly be with his/her parents first several years of his/her life) does sound somewhat lacking in mental department, thus my remark about him being a retard. Everything we know about Polychrome is that she dances a lot and drinks exclusively morning dew. So 4 start for the imagination and 2 start for characterization averages 3 stars as the overall rating.