What Smack Said #10
We're into double digits! Couldn't do it without you.
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Welcome to issue 10! Double digits, good lord. Next thing you know we'll be at the one-year mark.
April, like March, was a good reading month. I'm busy enough that nearly every hour of my days are planned, but I'm consciously taking time to read and refill my creative well. That, and I just sleep better when I read before bed.
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Tomorrow marks the start of San Diego's 2022 Book Crawl, which is when all the independent bookstores in San Diego come together in one big weekend event. At your first bookstore, you receive a "passport" and one stamp. Every bookstore you spend a minimum of $5 at means you get another stamp, and the more stamps you get, the more prizes you receive—things like pins and tote bags, and a 3D printed trophy for stopping at all 11 bookstores. This is the first in-person SD Book Crawl since 2019, and new stores have appeared since then. It's going to be a good weekend! |
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I'll be honest, this month's Best Book of the Month took me by surprise. I picked up
The Conductors by Nicole Glover on a whim (never leave an indie bookstore without a purchase, no matter how small) based on the cover and back summary alone—no reviews, word-of-mouth, or social media behind the decision, which I realized afterward is pretty rare for me.
The book follows a married couple who, in Reconstruction-era Philadelphia, solve uncanny mysteries (and murders!) in the black community with constellation-based magic. Now reread that sentence, because every single part of it is
awesome. |
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Hetty and Benjy are both formerly enslaved people who escaped and became conductors for the Underground Railroad. It's a marriage of convenience, mostly so they (particularly Hetty) could stay proper while still traveling together for months at a time while operating as conductors. They have a warm, caring partnership where they know they can trust the other with their life. |
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There are a number of parallels to the original Sherlock Holmes stories, including references to Hetty and Benji's previous adventures and flashbacks to help provide context for the characters' current actions. It's appropriate, too, since the events of
The Conductors predates the Holmes stories by ten to twenty years. However, Nicole Glover has drastically improved on the typical structure of a Holmes mystery, which usually has odd and boring flashbacks. |
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The Conductors also has flashbacks, but they're used sparingly and to great effect. Plenty of writers will tell you that 99.5 percent of the time, flashbacks drag at a plot rather than advance it (I'm one of them!), but I was overwhelmed with just how perfectly each of them accentuates the main thrust of the story. They were like little diamonds. |
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However, it did take me fifty to sixty pages to really get into the story, so don't get discouraged if you don't immediately love it. The prose in those first pages read, to me, like an earlier draft than the rest of the book. As I told a couple of friends, though, after those fifty to sixty pages I grew so fully invested that I couldn't actually make myself slow down and look at the prose more granularly. The prose didn't matter because I
needed to know what happened next.
Needed it like breathing. |
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If you're interested in getting your own copy,
The Conductors is available at B&N here and through Amazon here. (And as usual, those aren't affiliate links and I don't make anything if you click on them.)
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Impact Winter by Travis Beacham — This is an expertly-produced audiobook drama that I just couldn't get enough of. It's a post-apocalypse vampire story written specifically for audio, so there were no dialogue tags, just an incredible cast of voice actors with very realistic sound effects to set the scene. Even without noise canceling headphones, a door would open and I would turn around to look.
Hunt the Stars by Jessie Mihalik — Jessie Mihalik books are pretty much an auto-buy for me these days. I love her "soft" science fiction, which has standard SF trappings like faster-than-light (FTL) space travel but doesn't get hung up on the technicalities.
Hunt the Stars also has lots of fun and twisty political intrigues.
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