Junior Broadway: How to Produce Musicals With Children Nine to Thirteen Book

If someone were doing a giant research project on the Tom Swift books, this book would be invaluable. It traces the history of Tom Swift in a number of detailed ways, looking at everything from the sci-fi qualities of the character's inventions to the possible locations of his hometown. From there, though, Dizer broadens out to talk about all of the Stratemeyer Syndicate's boys books, in terms of contemporary literary critiques, political attitudes (containing a lengthy chapter on the problematic treatment of race in these books that felt a little reductive), and their literary influences and what they then turned to influence.

Since I'm researching Stratemeyer's girls' books, this is not directly or strongly applicable to what I'm doing. Still, this is detailed and far-reaching enough that I'll be able to make use of it in regards to The Moving Picture Girls. It's wildly biased, by the author's own admission, but thorough enough that there's still plenty useful there, particularly for scholars of Stratemeyer's boys' series books.