L.R. LAM's Micah Grey series: SHADOWPLAY, & PANTOMIME

SHADOWPLAY (Micah Grey #2)
L.R. LAM
DAW Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, preorder for delivery tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the second installment of the Micah Grey Trilogy from the award-winning, USA Today-bestselling author of Dragonfall, Micah must learn two types of magic—one for the stage, and one with deadlier consequences—while navigating a tender new love.

Old magics are waking. Will the world survive their return?

Micah Grey almost died when he fled the circus with Drystan. Now he and the ex-clown must use Glamours to disguise themselves and hide in the once-grand Kymri Theatre, run by a once-renowned magician, Jasper Maske. Drystan claims Maske’s stage magic is all smoke and mirrors, but where’s the line between trickery and real power?

Micah and Drystan will soon learn the answer, when Maske's arch-nemesis challenges them all to a duel that will seal all their fates.

Meanwhile, the Shadow still haunts Micah’s steps, and as the duel draws near, Micah increasingly suffers from dark visions. Events that destroyed the ancient world are being replayed. Can Micah's latent powers break this deadly pattern?

In this rich and evocative second novel of the Micah Grey series, L.R. Lam blends a coming-of-age story, queer romance, and magical powers into a charming and original fantasy world, inspired by Victorian Scotland.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Second book in a trilogy about Gene/Micah and his path to fully inhabiting an intersex identity, this YA novel, as revised, comes out tomorrow.

Much interesting information about Micah's heritage, intersex being, and magical ability is revealed in this story. While I was often reminded forcefully of Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, I was more than ever pleased by the exploration beyond heteronormative boundaries as Micah, Drystan (I always read this as Dristan, an old allergy medication).

We're out of the circus now for Reasons (read the first one!), and into a theater where Drystan's old...connection Jasper takes the two in, agrees to educate them in magic, and...well...the story takes off. I confess I'd've liked staying in the circus permaybehaps a bit more, but the change allows the story's stakes to change in some fun ways. Restricting the secondary characters was a help to my focus, I quit wondering about people we hadn't seen in a while, but conversely I felt like Micah was flatter now that the high-wire was replaced by seances and illusions. I get it...I am not unclear on what's being said, down off the wire and in people's faces it takes more than physical skill it takes training and planning and cunning to achieve the goal of getting along as an Other.

Because we're in a less hectic setting we also get to hear and think more about the world outside. That bonus comes with some unpleasant realizations. It's never very nice to learn that humans are rotten, but it comes at quite a cost this time. I further confess I was a little worried that there would be a love triangle when a new character, Cyan, showed up; happily there is no sign of that yet.

I would've become the biggest Potterhead-level stan of these stories as a teen! They're aimed right at the sweet spot of self-discovery, self-acceptance, and learning to form deep bonds. I'll hope to get volume three, Masquerade, before it comes out in March 2026.

Four more solid stars!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

PANTOMIME (Micah Grey #1)
L.R. LAM
DAW Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the USA Today-bestselling author of Dragonfall comes a fantasy trilogy about a circus aerialist's quest to escape his past and decipher the magical prophecy that will shape his future

In a land of lost wonders, the past is stirring once more . . .

Micah runs away from a debutante’s life at home and joins the circus, harboring two secrets–one: he was born between male and female, and two: he may have powers last seen in mysterious beings from an almost-forgotten age. Micah discovers the joy of flight as an aerialist, courting his trapeze partner, Aenea, and confiding in the mysterious white clown, Drystan. He finally feels free. But the circus has a dark side, and Micah’s past isn’t done with him.

Meanwhile, the strange 'ghost' of a woman with damselfly wings whispers to Micah that only he can help magic return to the realm, and he fears she may be right...Micah has much to learn, and he must do it quickly—before his past and future collide, with catastrophic consequences.

Pantomime is a gorgeous and inventive fantasy with queer elements, inspired by Victorian Scotland. L.R. Lam weaves a coming-of-age tale, stirrings of first love, and prophetic whispers into this unforgettable first installment of the Micah Grey series.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Raised female as Iphiginia Laurus, PoV character Micah is always aware that the life of a privileged debutante is not just uninteresting to contemplate, it's also a violation of the essential self...recreated as Micah, then adds another identity called Gene...that's never going to fit into a world of binaries.

Major spoiler? When the publisher markets these revised and rereleased stories as "the Micah Grey series," I don't think it applies. Intersex people presenting themselves openly are vanishingly rare in both literary and real-life culture. Micah moving from female-presenting to male-presenting might not be ideal, but considering we live in an obsessed-by-binaries culture, it's honest.

Coming to terms with one's essential being's Otherness, coming of age in a world with Procrustean expectations and draconian penalties for failing to meet them, and falling in love while not falling off the highwire, as Micah navigates...enough for ten volumes of story. Author Lam packs a lot into a modest page count.

Revised (I am reliably informed extensively) more than a decade after bowing as an indie-published title, the DAW Books edition was my introduction to the circus world and its denizens. I like stories set in circuses, while disliking circuses themselves. (I will not knowingly go to a place where there are clowns and/or mimes.) The opportunities for honest exploration of self, of identities that make the normies cringe (like I do around clowns/mimes) are perfection for addressing YA audiences who are in their questing and questioning years. In this case, the protagonist knows, has powerful physical evidence for knowing, that the world demands too much when it insists there is no fluidity in our gender presentation. The protagonist falls in love, for the first time, and realizes that's really what matters...connection, caring, the desire to know and be known...all presented as worthy, ordinary quests for one to engage in. All this is set in a fantasy secondary world, one base on Scotland it would seem; one that's got elements of urban fantasy, steampunk-lite, and high fantasy.

Why choose is Author Lam's message as well as praxis. Much is discovered about this world, despite very little being directly said. It becomes a bit troublesome. While Micah's flashbacks to the past as Iphiginia are crystal-clear, with very sharp lines of conflict, the present-day Micah/Gene is not clearly in conflict with the circus's other oddballs and misfits yet lives in fear of being "outed" as intersex to them. Why? Never explained.

A few other things felt odd, like Aenea's oddly-pitched response to Micah's evident falling in love. So the read isn't perfect, but honestly I'm not mad about it. I'm happy to see someone making real and substantive excursions from the tediously heteronormative blob of YA publishing's masses of pages.

A solid four stars for the 2025 revisions!

THE SECRET OF THE STRATEMEYER SYNDICATE, a 32-year-old study of the *business* of the Nancy Drew publisher

THE SECRET OF THE STRATEMEYER SYNDICATE: Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and the Million Dollar Fiction Factory
CAROL BILLMAN
Out of print
$Oooodles and Gobs

Rating: 3.75* of five

What The Publisher Says must remain a mystery, since I forgot to copy the flap copy and the Amazon description is pointlessly brief. It is also the source of, or copied from, I can't say which, all other online descriptions of the book.

My Review:This is Author Billman's only book publication that I can find. An academic paper of hers on the virtue and values instilled by McGuffey's Readers and Horatio Alger Jr's grit-and-character novels, published in a 1977 edition of the journal Popular Culture, appears to be the remainder of her internet-accessible output. I am led to believe that she had a career as an English professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio during the period in which she published the Alger paper. So the question of why she wrote a book on the business of the Stratemeyer Syndicate is answered: Her interest in children's literature and its purposes through the years was deep enough to make it a career.

It says something about that fact that I am a bit sad more didn't come out of it.

My pleasure in reading this odd, out-of-the-way volume was deep.

For young readers, it would seem, mystery fiction represents an especially clear case of what any reading of a story involves. The process of reading is still an uncertain enough proposition. Thus the series mystery—replete with characters who are unmistakably good or evil, easily recognized clues as to the crime's solution and to the way the story is told as well (for example, cliffhanging chapter endings), and a writing style that is both familiar and undemanding—offers extraordinary inducements for apprentice readers just coming to feel at home with the idea and act of reading a novel.

No wonder I still like mysteries. The experience of reading the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew was designed to scratch that specific itchy place in me. It was my training ground for decoding stories. Simple words, obvious clues, and a strong linear plot gave me a track record of success in analyzing stories for their payoffs. Author Billman makes this memory fresh by going into the act of creating the novels I read. I re-experienced through the memories her book called up the sheer joy of reaching the solution to The Shore Road Mystery before Frank and Joe did. It was a story about stolen cars, and Mama figured that alone would get me going. How right she was!

The boys' slightly louche friend Dodd (first name escapes me) is being framed for car theft, along with his dad. The boys know he's innocent, so his dad must be too; Fenton Hardy, their dad, gets involved because this little drama is a side-show to one of his own, adult-therefore-important cases pursuing an interstate car-theft ring. The solution to both cases involves baiting a trap to get the thieves to lead the cops to the cars. It works, of course, and there's even some gunfire (no one's injured, naturally) to spice it up. I knew that the cars were hidden in the area before this coup de foudre struck the heroes. That was a wonderful feeling, as witness I can call it up more than a half-century later.

Author Billman's thesis, that this experience of mine was carefully designed and multiply repeated, isn't original to her. Bobbie Ann Mason's 1975 feminist work, The Girl Sleuth, gives voice to much the same idea when she says of the Syndicate's house style, "The series are so carefully styleless that you can't point to bad puns, strained metaphors, overloaded descriptions. There is an absence of language: there is vocabulary, but not language." It takes care and attention to detail to make that accurate assessment of Syndicate novels work over many hundreds of books. The Syndicate's business purpose, to make and sell as much storytelling as they could, followed a tried-and-true path of building brand loyalty:

First, Happy Hollisters readers move on to the Hardy Boys and/or Nancy Drew...readers do not simply abandon those books they once regarded so highly...They also carry over the confidence gained from stories about successful young discoverers and a literary template--a sense of how stories are constructed and proceed--that will be helpful later. Schooled in the elementary virtues of fiction and having fully discovered all the secrets of the series mysteries for themselves, they are ready, in both senses of the word, to explore what is beyond.

For many, many of us readers, this ladder of consumption was a step-ladder to a lifelong joy in reading. Millions and millions of delighted young story addicts spent billions of hours ignoring chores and avoiding busybody siblings by shoving out faces in a book. The Syndicate's profit motive, set by Stratemeyer all the way back to when he was ghosting the last few Alger books that had been outlined before the man died, was to create and then satisfy demand for stories.

Stratemeyer's idea wasn't, however, the first sally onto that field. Billman explains his own experiences as a juvenile-fiction writer were in service of the established leaders in the field like Grosset & Dunlap (now a Penguin Random House subsidiary and still in business!) with the Rover Boys stories. Thirty titles strong, this series began in 1899 and ended in 1926. It was Arthur M. Winfield's pseudonym that launched Stratemeyer's original idea: Hire the writers to work to his detailed plan for the particular story in a simple, pared-down style. While Stratemeyer wrote all the Rover Boys titles, he simply couldn't write all the books that a successful book packager would need to keep the demand for juvenile books (what today we call YA) met. Dozens of series were begun, many survived, but a few thrived.

The Hardy Boys series began in 1927 with The Tower Treasure, written by Stratemeyer himself. There followed a flood of titles, rewrites, and spin-offs in other media. The series was substantially rewritten beginning in 1959 to modernize its language, concerns, and attitudes; the world had changed a lot in the intervening 32 years. Another 20 years passed before further modifications became urgent; the series itself was rebooted in 2005 without the original titles and plots so RIP The Hardy Boys 1927-2005. Seventy-eight years!

Nancy Drew's adventures began in 1930 with The Secret of the Old Clock, again penned by old man Stratemeyer himself. As he died that year, he was unable to continue the series...his daughter Harriet Adams was the principal of the firm until it was finally sold in 1984. Nancy Drew was the unequivocal monster success of the Syndicate: Over 200 titles across several series! Aside from the obviously necessary tartings-up any book series over 80 years old (1930-2013) will need. The character survives to this day, though in unrecognizable form if one goes back to the ur-text of 1930.

Billman also details the Ruth Fielding series and the lessons it had for the syndicate. It lasted from 1913 to 1934 for a total of thirty books. Like the earlier Rover Boys series, the characters in this series aged at something like ordinary speed. By book 30, Ruth was married and had a child. That was the kiss of death for a series aimed at juveniles, like the main characters finally hooking up is for TV shows (eg, Moonlighting). It was a lesson that the Syndicate learned well:

In short, the Hardys remain locked in that period between childhood and adult life that psychologist Erik Erikson has characterized as a moratorium—the quiet and deep sleep of fairy tale characters that precedes awakening into maturity.

So Frank and Joe are eternally 18 and 16, up from the 1927 ages of 16 and 14; Nancy Drew is 18, having started at 16. And their audience, per much publisher research, got younger by two years with each reader generation. Now the audience is tweens, through 12 years old; in my day, I lost interest in the books at about 11 or 12. It's my observation that the need to puzzle out mysteries gets more urgent as the decades pass, so it's natural that the audience for lessons on the subject gets younger as well.

Ruth Fielding's thirty-book run sounds amazing to mere mortals; Nancy Drew, whose character is in the same moratorium Author Billman identifies, blows that record apart. The other part of the Syndicate's genius was in focusing its output on mysteries. Most of us like to solve puzzles, on some level. There's enormous satisfaction in the effort being rewarded for adults; for children, the pleasure is sharper and more immediate:

Psychoanalyst Lili Peller has commented that stories about uncovering secrets are naturals for children, for whom life is full of secrets adults are guarding. More specifically, {another author of psychological studies on the Hardy Boys} has suggested a Freudian fascination in the Hardy Boys series with yawning-mouthed caves.

Lots and lots of caves and tunnels in them Hardy Boys books...yep...but anyway, the point is well-made that kids need puzzle-solving as well as problem-solving skills and the Syndicate's output was tailor-made to satisfy both needs. Author Billman, writing in the early 1980s, saw the evidence of this successful meeting of a need leading to commercial success at flood tide. After the Syndicate was sold to Simon and Schuster in 1984, the books kept coming. The series, of course, were ruthlessly trimmed to the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew; this makes sense as the nature of mysteries is to be addictive.

Ask any Salvo Montalbano or Meg Langslow addict.