Booklog 13/2019 - Laura Lam: Pantomime - Micah Grey #1

[jacey]

This is set in a place (Ellada) which is not our own, but has a Victorian feel to it. Brought up as a girl, Gene (Iphigenia Laurus) and her parents are hiding a secret that would see her shunned by the nobility. Gene is both male and female and prefers tomboyish pursuits with her brother and his friends, to the debutante circuit she's about to be launched into. She also has magical abilities to interact with glowing glass mounds left by a previous civilisation.

When her parents plan a devastating betrayal, Gene flees home as a boy. Reinventing herself as Micah Grey, and joins R.H. Ragona's Circus of Magic where he learns to fly. Intersexuality and bisexuality form the baseline for happenings within the circus itself and are sensitively dealt with. Gene/Micah is a, engaging and sympathetic character.

Laura Lam's writing style is clear and engrossing. We don't learn much about Micah's magical abilities, however. I felt they could have been used to cause more trouble for him in the circus, though I'm sure the next two books in the trilogy will deal with them more than adequately. My only real beef with this is that it's the first part of a trilogy and so doesn't really resolve at the end. It's terribly tempting to have a cliffhanger ending when writing trilogies or series, but I do like an ending, even though some threads are unresolved (or are resolved but immediately come unravelled at the beginning of the next book.