Conductors

It took me a little while to become fully immersed in the story, and there's a lot going on with a lot of characters but, by the end, I had a good handle on who everyone was and how they were related to each other. But, wow, there's a lot going on.

I think I would have given this a 5 star rating except the motivation and plan of the Bad Guy seemed a bit of a stretch to me. I'm not giving anything away but when the reveal happened, I was left scratching my head wondering, "What? Really?"

With that said, I came to love Hetty and Benjy and their friends. I definitely want to continue with their adventures so I hope the next in the series is coming out sometime soonish.

We're discussing The Conductors on the next Cocktail Hour (10/1/22) so you can check that out if you want a much more in-depth review from all three of us.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ebook ARC. Of course I waited so long to read it, I was able to borrow the audiobook from Hoopla and my local library. January Lavoy is great as the narrator, by the way. I bounced back and forth between the audio and ebook as I had time for eyeball reading.

2.5 stars

Thank you to Netgalley for an arc of this book.

I was very excited about this premise, a badass protagonist, underground railroad but make it magical, murder mystery. However, the plot fell flat for me. The first half of the book was at such a slow pace, it took me months to get 60% done. Although I loved Hetty and Benjy, the speed of the plot made it hard to feel fully connected to them. The book finally got interesting around the 75% mark, but then even the grand reveals did not feel that grand. When the mystery is solved and the villian revealed, I want there to be a sense of putting the pieces together myself and thinking, "how didn't I see this?!", instead the main characters had the villian explaining everything they had done and why, without any solving on Hetty an Benjy's part. I rounded down to a 2 star merely because of how long it took me to get through the book, but if I had read it in one go, maybe it would have been more of a 3 star.