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Mar. 7th, 2022 08:49 pmNicole Glover's The Conductors is a book that is conceptually fantastic in like three different ways and also, basically, did not really work for me as a book, but did leave me staring in deep admiration at the brilliant and ambitious skeleton of its story structure.
The book is set in an alternate-history Reconstruction-era Philadelphia with magic, where spellcasting former Underground Railroad conductors Hetty and Benjy have ended up as the least financially stable members of a social circle mostly composed of people that they once guided to freedom. When the book begins, Hetty and Benjy are both on the outs with some of their more upwardly-mobile friends, until one of them turns up murdered, at which point they are faced with the uncomfortable suspicion that someone they know and trust committed the crime.
I will be honest, the magic is the least interesting thing to me about this book and I did not care about it. I also could not at all follow the murder plot, and having finished the book an hour ago I am still not at all sure why most of the murdered people actually died.
What I really loved, on the other hand, was the way the book starts after the end of slavery, when all the characters are building lives of middle-class respectability and stressing over relatively petty things (at one point two characters are considered suspects for the first murder because the victim had taken over their house for an annoyingly loud party the week before!) with the past haunting them, consistently and terrifyingly relevant in a way most of them felt uncomfortable acknowledging, but also not all-defining. I love narratives that begin where other stories end, and I was fascinated by the way the book staked out its narrative space in a community that was built through helping each other survive trauma, and the way that community started to fracture in the tension between the people who still felt themselves defined by it and the people who wanted to leave it behind. The whole messy web of friends & relations & acquaintances was so much more complicated and interesting than I expected from the premise of 'magical mystery solving in 1871', and I deeply wish I had been able to connect with any of the side characters as characters but there was simply Too Much Going On All The Time, see above re: the mystery plot I could not follow.
The main emotional thread of the book is the fractured friends-circle, but the other is the relationship between Hetty & Benjy themselves; Hetty prides herself on the practicality of their friends-with-benefits style marriage of convenience and realizes somewhat to her dismay midway through the book that their ten years of partnership also seems to now encompass Feelings. As a romantic premise this is a.) unusual and b.) top tier and once again the emotional beats of it often did not quite land for me, but I once again I deeply respected the concept and the underlying bones: so much of a traditional Romance arc is built on, like, Clear Changes In State to symbolize emotional movement (are these people banging each other? are these people living together? are these people going to make a long-term commitment to each other?) and Glover just put all of those milestones comfortably in the past and set herself the challenge of having the change be entirely internal, a realization about who they are as people that changes almost nothing about their lives and the ways in which they intersect except how they feel about it. Ambitious and difficult! IMO not fully successful in execution but I truly love that she tried!
The book is set in an alternate-history Reconstruction-era Philadelphia with magic, where spellcasting former Underground Railroad conductors Hetty and Benjy have ended up as the least financially stable members of a social circle mostly composed of people that they once guided to freedom. When the book begins, Hetty and Benjy are both on the outs with some of their more upwardly-mobile friends, until one of them turns up murdered, at which point they are faced with the uncomfortable suspicion that someone they know and trust committed the crime.
I will be honest, the magic is the least interesting thing to me about this book and I did not care about it. I also could not at all follow the murder plot, and having finished the book an hour ago I am still not at all sure why most of the murdered people actually died.
What I really loved, on the other hand, was the way the book starts after the end of slavery, when all the characters are building lives of middle-class respectability and stressing over relatively petty things (at one point two characters are considered suspects for the first murder because the victim had taken over their house for an annoyingly loud party the week before!) with the past haunting them, consistently and terrifyingly relevant in a way most of them felt uncomfortable acknowledging, but also not all-defining. I love narratives that begin where other stories end, and I was fascinated by the way the book staked out its narrative space in a community that was built through helping each other survive trauma, and the way that community started to fracture in the tension between the people who still felt themselves defined by it and the people who wanted to leave it behind. The whole messy web of friends & relations & acquaintances was so much more complicated and interesting than I expected from the premise of 'magical mystery solving in 1871', and I deeply wish I had been able to connect with any of the side characters as characters but there was simply Too Much Going On All The Time, see above re: the mystery plot I could not follow.
The main emotional thread of the book is the fractured friends-circle, but the other is the relationship between Hetty & Benjy themselves; Hetty prides herself on the practicality of their friends-with-benefits style marriage of convenience and realizes somewhat to her dismay midway through the book that their ten years of partnership also seems to now encompass Feelings. As a romantic premise this is a.) unusual and b.) top tier and once again the emotional beats of it often did not quite land for me, but I once again I deeply respected the concept and the underlying bones: so much of a traditional Romance arc is built on, like, Clear Changes In State to symbolize emotional movement (are these people banging each other? are these people living together? are these people going to make a long-term commitment to each other?) and Glover just put all of those milestones comfortably in the past and set herself the challenge of having the change be entirely internal, a realization about who they are as people that changes almost nothing about their lives and the ways in which they intersect except how they feel about it. Ambitious and difficult! IMO not fully successful in execution but I truly love that she tried!
