Visitors from Oz Book

This one was published back in 1998, and had much better distribution than most recent Oz books, but the reviews made me loath to read it. For some reason, it was only last month that I got the idea to look for it at the library. I've admired Gardner since reading The Annotated Alice back in my childhood, and I know he was a lifelong fan of Oz. Unfortunately, while there was some potential to this story, I don't think it really lived up to it. The plot involves a movie producer named Samuel Gold who manages to get into e-mail contact with Glinda, and she agrees to see if Dorothy and her friends will visit the United States to promote a film Gold is making. Why they'd show up for him and not any of the other people who have tried to promote Oz over the years, I couldn't say. Since Oz has been separated from our own Earth since the time of The Emerald City of Oz, and magical transportation between the two is impossible…wait, since when is this the case? Glinda did make Oz invisible at the end of Emerald City, but this pertained only to the land surrounded by the Deadly Desert, not all of fairyland. Also, there are plenty of examples of magical transportation between the mundane and fairy worlds in books later than Emerald City. Gardner seems to have wanted to use a non-orientable object called a Klein Bottle to get Dorothy to America, and disregarded prior continuity in order to utilize this device. A lot of this book appears to have been stuff Gardner wanted to address, but couldn't convincingly fit into the plot. Dorothy and her companions visit Wonderland and meet its citizens, but pretty much all they do is explain how Lewis Carroll made them out to be a lot crazier than they really are. There's a pointless diversion involving an ursine detective named Sheerluck Brown and a giant called Big Jim Foote, which actually might be the most amusing part of the story. When the visitors reach the States, they meet with celebrities like Oprah and Rudy Giuliani (the Mayor of New York at the time). In order to add some conflict, there's a rival producer named Buffalo Boggs who has mob ties and severe body odor in place of any actual characterization. He sends some stereotypical Italian mobsters to kill the Ozites, apparently just so he can ruin the promotion for his competitor's film. There's also a bit where Dorothy takes down a stereotypical Muslim hijacker with help from the Pearls of Pingaree. The introduction of the Pearls is another thing that doesn't really make sense, as the story explains that the King of Pingaree gave them to Glinda. So a small, vulnerable island nation gives up its only magical protection to someone in a country full of magic? Maybe it's a comment on superpower politics, but I'm inclined to think Gardner just wanted to show the Pearls working in America and didn't bother to come up with a convincing way to put them in. So, yeah, this could have been a lot better.