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''Sky Island: Being the Further Adventures of Trot and Cap'n Bill after Their Visit to the Sea Fairies'' is a children's fantasy novel written by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill, and published in 1912 by the Reilly & Britton Company〔Patrick M. Maund, "Bibliographia Baumiana: ''Sky Island''," ''The Baum Bugle'', Vol. 39 No. 2 (Autumn 1995), pp. 22-25.〕—the same constellation of forces that produced the Oz books in the first decades of the twentieth century. As the full title indicates, ''Sky Island'' is a sequel to Baum's ''The Sea Fairies'' of 1911. Both books were intended as parts of a projected long-running fantasy series to replace the Oz books. Given the relatively tepid reception of the first book in the series, however, Baum tried to attract young readers by including two characters from his Oz mythos in ''Sky Island''—Button-Bright and Polychrome, originally introduced in ''The Road to Oz'' (1909). The book was dedicated to the author's sister, Mary Louise Baum Brewster. ==Plot summary== Trot, a little girl who lives on the coast of southern California, meets a strange little boy with a large umbrella. Button Bright has been using his family's magic umbrella to take long-range journeys from his Philadelphia home, and has gotten as far as California. After an explanation of how the magic umbrella works, the two children, joined by Cap'n Bill, decide to take a trip to a nearby island; they call it "Sky island," because it looks like it's "halfway in the sky"—but the umbrella takes them to a different place entirely, a literal island in the sky. Sky Island is another split-color country in Baum's fantasy universe, like the Land of Oz. Divided in two-halves, blue and pink, Sky Island supports two separate races of beings, the Blues and the Pinkies. The two halves are separated by a region shrouded in fog, which both peoples are reluctant to enter. The three travellers land on the blue side of Sky Island, which is a grim country ruled by a sadistic tyrant, the Boolooroo of the Blues. In Sky Island, as in Oz, no one can be killed or suffer pain, but that doesn't mean one is safe: the Boolooroo's method of punishing disobedience in his subjects is to split his victims into halves using a huge guillotine-type knife, and then join the wrong halves back together, creating very unhappy asymmetrical mixed people. This is called "patching." The Boolooroo threatens to do the same to his new visitors; meanwhile he steals the magic umbrella, keeps the visitors imprisoned, and gives Trot as a slave to his daughters, the Six Snubnosed Princesses (named Cerulia, Turquoise, Sapphire, Azure, Cobalt, and Indigo). The three protagonists manage to escape from the Blues; penetrating the Great Fog Bank that separates the island's halves and meeting its strange inhabitants, they reach the pink side of the island. The Pink Country is a much friendlier and more relaxed place than the blue side, with cheerful residents. The visitors get a better reception, since they are rather pink in color themselves, albeit of a sadly wan and pale shade. Unfortunately, the laws of the Pink Country require that all strangers must be thrown off the edge of Sky Island. Polychrome, the daughter of the rainbow, descends from the rainbow like a ''deus ex machina'' to resolve the problem and helps Tormaline, the poverty queen of the Pinkies, to re-interpret the law. Trot is promoted to Queen of the Pinkies, because she has the palest skin among them, which is the sole criterion for becoming Queen, according to the laws of the Pink Country. She uses her new power as Queen to mount an invasion of the Blue Country in order to recover the magic umbrella from the Boolooroo. The Pinkies win the battle, and Trot becomes "Booloorooess" of the Blues as well. The three travellers eventually return to their homes, more than a little relieved at their escape from Sky Island. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sky Island」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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