Nicole Glover got her first computer when she was about 10 and nixed playing with computer games.
She went straight to a blank document so that she could write.
She wrote chapter books about friends solving mysteries. She created her own clip art and printed the books for her own personal library. As she grew, so did her stories. They were filled with magic fueled by earth, wind and fire, and superheroes whose powers were empathy and healing.
Glover, who lives in Norfolk, had always devoured books, but the writing came from a desire to read what she couldn’t find on library shelves.
“For me, it’s about telling certain stories, telling things that I haven’t read but I wanted to see,” she said.
That desire is behind her debut novel, “The Conductors,” a historical fantasy released Tuesday by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It is the first installment of her Murder & Magic series.
“Conductors” is set in 1870s Philadelphia among a community of formerly enslaved African Americans who are re-establishing themselves after the Civil War.
At the center are Henrietta “Hetty” Rhodes and her husband, Benjy. They worked as conductors on the very real Underground Railroad, freeing themselves and others through the surreptitious network that meandered from the South to Canada.
Hetty and Benjy were barred from using their celestial magic, powers drawn from nature and the stars, while enslaved. After the war, they use their talents to solve mysteries. But their abilities are challenged when they have to investigate the murder of a friend.
Hetty had always been a powerful force and bears the scars that marked her magic and bondage. The enslaved who could perform magic were subdued by their owners with silver collars that would sound like an alarm if they escaped.
Slaveowners ruled with wands, which Blacks were forbidden to use even after the war. Whites wielded a sorcery that allowed them to dominate, and it “spread around the world with conquerors, pilgrims, and missionaries,” Glover writes.
Hetty’s magic was taught to her by her mother as a “mixture of lore brought over from Africa, from the West Indies, and even from the native peoples of this land. … It incorporated traditions that found ways to brew magic with herbs, to enchant candles for protection, to use song to rejuvenate, and, most important, to develop sigils from the constellations.”
Hetty and Benjy take readers on several adventures, including their marriage of convenience that may become something more. The novel weaves in humor and local history — such as runaways who hid in the Great Dismal Swamp — and it is done with the freedom that fantasy allows Glover.
“Magic and fantasy are just fun. … Even as a kid, I thought, ‘Why do I have to go about this boring world with no magic,’ ” Glover said.
“As I got older, I realized the nuances. You get to say a lot of things in a fantasy world and science fiction that you can’t say in a more real-world setting.”
___
“The Conductors,” however, does pull on Glover’s real world.
She grew up in an Army family that was stationed in areas alive with Civil War ghosts, such as Columbia, South Carolina, and Fredericksburg, Virginia.
She’s also a product of a family of educators. Both sets of grandparents were teachers and principals, and she’d spend summers with her maternal grandparents in Charleston, where her grandmother ran a summer school program. Libraries were her third home.
Even today, 31-year-old Glover says she doesn’t have many books at her home, in Ghent; she’d rather prowl a library for her reads.
But as a kid, when she realized that people wrote these wondrous volumes for a living she was determined to become an author.
“I knew I wanted to have my name on a book one day, that you could go to a library and get it,” she said. “I always said that everything else I do is so that I can have the ability to write. I got a job, I got an education just so that I can have some time to write without worries.”
Glover got a psychology degree from the University of Mary Washington in 2010 and a master’s at the University of New Haven in industrial-organizational psychology.
Now she works as a user researcher, or UX, for Dominion Enterprises’ homes.com. The job combines other interests of hers, computers and psychology. She studies how to make online content more clickable and more readable for people.
She was always writing, spending most of her lunch breaks at the Slover Library, after-work hours and weekends scribbling down story ideas and plots.
She wrote a steampunk-themed book several years ago and pitched it to publishers. She didn’t get any bites, but she learned the ins and outs of the publishing process.
___
In 2015, Glover was ready to tackle another book and pulled out a historical storyline she’d been working on, about the Underground Railroad.
While on a walk one day, she mulled over different threads such as magic and mysteries. She’s always loved astronomy and the mysticism around astrology.
It hit her: Why not combine them? She began the process of writing and rewriting, nailing down history while giving the fantasy a reality. For example, if the enslaved could perform magic, how could they not stop slavery? There had to be an equally powerful, opposing, magic system at play.
“You have to balance it out,” Glover said. “If this person has magic, what changes, basically? I was also interested in seeing a world where everyone had magic … but if you don’t do certain things, people will have questions. You have to have it make sense for the reader.”
In the summer of 2018, she found an agent who liked her story. By December, she had a publishing deal.
John Joseph Adams is an at-large editor for John Joseph Adams, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
He read the book and was hooked.
“Right from the start, I was grabbed by the concept — Underground Railroad conductors that use magic! — and then immediately fell in love with the characters,” he wrote in an email. “Hetty and Benjy are wonderful protagonists, and I think the way their relationship develops over the course of the novel is really endearing and well-wrought. I also think it can be very hard to make up a magic system and integrate it well into a real-world setting, but I feel like Nicole really managed to make not only the system itself shine but to come up with some competing magic systems from other cultures as well. All in all, the book just felt really vibrant to me and particularly impressive for a debut.”
So far, the reviews have been, well, magical.
Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called it a “nail-biting debut” and Glover “a writer to watch.”
She has just completed the edits for the sequel, “The Undertakers,” which is due to be released in November.
With her cadre of characters and storyline, there could be more to come.
To finally see her name on a book cover is surreal, even for a woman who loves fantasy.
Glover said, “Sometimes I think, ‘Is this really happening?’ “
Denise M. Watson, 757-446-2504, denise.watson@pilotonline.com
“The Conductors”: an excerpt
“The wind and soil, the storms and the calm,” they said together, repeating the words their mother had sung to them. “The magic is the world and it moves through us. There are words and rhyme and —”
Hetty’s words cut off with a cry as the collar turned iron hot against her skin.
“What’s wrong?” Esther crouched next to her. “You didn’t do any magic!”
“Something else,” Hetty spat. “Words have magic!”
“Hetty,” Esther said, and what else Esther had to say was lost as the pain reached the point where Hetty couldn’t breathe. This was just like what happened in the kitchen — but to make matters worse, now it was happening in front of Esther. Esther had never seen her like this. Never saw her crouched over in pain and unable to do more than let it run over her like rain. Hetty had always tried to keep this from her sister, to protect her like Mama had made her swear to. She was failing. Failing the only thing she could do in this terribly cruel world.
“Stop,” Hetty said, as she grasped at the collar, pulling uselessly against it, her sewing needle prickling against her skin. “Stop!”
Hetty kept pulling and pulling, and then the pain was gone.
The metal cooled and Hetty’s hands fell away . . . and so did the silver collar.
It fell into the dirt. Perfect twin halves spotted with blood.
If it had been a snake, they couldn’t have moved away faster.
“What did you do?” Esther whispered. “Was that magic?”
“Don’t know.” Hetty prodded the closest half to her with her sewing needle. It didn’t spark. No bells rang. “Don’t care. Did it glow when it came off?”
Esther shook her head.
“Then it’s dead. We have time. They can’t use it to follow us.”
Esther swallowed hard, but her voice didn’t tremble. “Where?”
“North.” Hetty clawed at the packed dirt. “We follow the stars.”
“That’s not a place,” Esther said rather seriously. “That’s a direction.”
Hetty almost laughed. She could always count on her little sister to find humor in the most terrible of times.
“It’s not. I don’t know where I want to go. I just know we can’t stay here.”
“I know a place,” Esther said. “I heard it healing some sick folks in the next farm over. They were talking bad about it, so that means it’s a good place for people like us.”
“Where’s that?”
“Philadelphia.”
“I don’t know where that is,” Hetty said as she buried the collar. “But let’s find out.”
— From “The Conductors,” by Nicole Glover (John Joseph Adams Books, 2021. Reprinted with permission.).
