Small Town, Big Magic by Hazel Beck ~ an Excerpt

Be sure to read MK's review of Small Town, Big Magic by Hazel Beck.

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site. A free book was provided for an honest review.

August 2022; Graydon House; 978-1525804717
audio, ebook, print (416 pages); magical realism

1

If you google my name—something I only do every other Tuesday because ego surfing is an indulgence and I keep my indulgences on a strict schedule—the first twenty hits are about the hanging of Sarah Emerson Wilde in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts.

Guess why.

Only after all those witch hits—three pages in—will you get to me, Emerson Wilde. Not a tragically executed woman accused of witchcraft by overwrought zealots, but a bookstore owner and chamber of commerce president. The youngest chamber of commerce president in the history of St. Cyprian, Missouri, not that I like to brag.

Men are applauded for embellishing the truth while women are seen as very confident for telling the truth—and very confident is never a compliment.

If you slog past all the Crucible references and sad YouTube videos from disaffected teens with too much eye makeup, you might read about how my committed rejuvenation efforts have brought ten new businesses to St. Cyprian in the past five years. You might read about our Christmas around the World Festival which, thanks to my hard work and total commitment, brings people from—you guessed it—all around the world. You could read any number of articles about what I’ve done to help St. Cyprian, because it’s not a good day unless I’ve done something to support the town I love best.

And I pride myself on making every day a good day.

Even if most people read about Sarah and the witch trials and stop there, I know the truth about her. I learned all about my notorious ancestor while researching a presentation for my fourth-grade class.

My peers might have preferred Skip Simon’s bold and unlikely claims that he was a direct descendent of the outlaw Jesse James, but learning about Sarah changed my life. The reality of Sarah Emerson Wilde is that she was a fierce feminist who wanted to play by her own rules. A nonconformist who wasn’t interested in playing the perfect Puritan, and therefore a direct threat to the Powers That Be. Following her own rules, ignoring theirs, and trumpeting her independence got her killed.

Sarah wasn’t only a tragic figure. She was also a fierce martyr who would have hated being called either.

In retrospect, it was maybe too much for Miss Timpkin’s fourth-grade class.

But ever since then I’ve considered Sarah my guiding light. I’m proud to have such an exceptional, indomitable woman in my family tree. My great-grandmother times nine, to be precise. I’ve always felt that I owe it to myself, the Wilde name, and Sarah to be a strong, independent woman who doesn’t let the patriarchy or anything else get her down for long.

“And I don’t,” I announce brightly to the quiet of the early-morning kitchen of my family’s historic house.

It’s a Tuesday in March and I have plans. I always have plans. It’s what I do, but these are particularly epic, even for me. I might have been born too late to speak feminist truth to Puritan patriarchal power, but I have my own calling.

I am here to make St. Cyprian a better place.

Don’t laugh.

You can’t fix the world until you sort out your own backyard. I intend to do both.

Since my first St. Cyprian community project with my second-grade class, I have put everything I am into this shining jewel of a river town, the people lucky enough to live here, and the shops that carve out their spots on the cobbled streets—like my own intensely independent bookstore.

For all the women who came before me who weren’t allowed. Or those who carved out their way and were shunned for it.

Fist pumps optional.

I pump a few on my own in the kitchen, because there are few things in this life that psyche a girl up more than a fist pump. One of those things is coffee. Another is sugar. Combine all three and I’m ready to face the day.

But first I need to face my roommate.

My roomie and best friend, Georgie Pendell, grew up in the rickety old house next door, but moved in with me when she could no longer bear another moment of agony in her parents’ house—her dramatic words, not mine. She’s been here five years, sprawled out over the third floor and using the extra bedroom I’d assumed she’d make into an office as a library instead.

Mind you, what Georgie calls a library gives me hives. It’s an overflowing catastrophe of books piled into tottery towers that she refuses to let me organize for her. The last time I tried to go inside, the door only opened about two inches before hitting one of her stacks.

She insists it’s exactly the way she wants it.

And that’s fine, because Wilde House is big enough for the both of us. In fact, bigger than we need. With my parents gone living the high life in Europe and my sister’s defection to who knows where after our high school graduation, the house had seemed too big. I had been thrown for a loop when both my sister and parents left St. Cyprian within a year of each other—though I’d rallied the way I always do. My sister, Rebekah, had always been a free spirit. My parents had always been socially ambitious—so why not take that as far as it could go on the Continent? I had the town. I had my friends. I got to live in this piece of history with my grandmother. Yet when my grandmother died a few years later and left me here alone, the old house felt like an ominous, rattling thing that might swallow me whole. Winter had seemed to seep in, cruel and unforgiving. The halls had seemed too long, the lights too dim.

Possibly I was grieving. The loss of Grandma. The loss of my family, who I knew had their reasons for staying away, in Rebekah’s case because she always had reasons no matter how little she communicated those reasons. Or returning only for the funeral, in my parents’ case, and then rushing back to their European adventure.

It felt a little stormy there for a while.

My silly, happy, eccentric best friend moving in has been like letting in the sunshine.

Organizational challenges aside, having her here makes these early mornings with the whole of Wilde House creaking around me, like it’s singing its own song while I wake, feel less…lonely.

Not that I allow loneliness in my life. I swat it down like an obnoxious fly anytime it pops up. Because loneliness is a betrayal of all the women who came before me and I am not going to be the Wilde who lets them down. I’m the current caretaker of this landmark of a house that’s been in my family some three hundred years, since the first Wilde wisely made the long trek away from the Massachusetts Colony and settled down in this part of Missouri where two great rivers meet, the Mississippi and the Missouri. I like the idea of roots that deep and rivers that tangle together. I like this house that towers above me with its uneven floors and oddly shaped rooms. I like where it sits in town, on one end of Main Street like a punctuation mark.

And I really like that my best friend is always right here, within reach.

Because before I head off to my beloved Confluence Books today, I need to get Georgie on board for an Official Friend Meeting tonight. Being a young, ambitious, independent woman in charge of the chamber of commerce in the most charming river town in Missouri—and therefore America—comes with its challenges. A strong leader knows when to lean in to her community, and I do. My friends are always the first people I turn to when I need some help.

I tell myself that I would do that even if my family was still here. That my friends are my family. My parents and sister are the black sheep—not me. Their leaving, their lack of contact entirely or bright, shallow, early-morning messages from abroad is their choice.

And their loss.

My friends stayed. They love St. Cyprian and loved my grandmother too. They are mine, and I am theirs. Just like this town I love so much.

Still, sometimes I like to make a gathering official because that makes it more likely we’ll get to the constructive advice more quickly.

I head for the curving narrow stairs that will take me up into the house’s turret. It’s never been my favorite part of the house—it makes me think of princesses and fairy tales and other embarrassingly romantic things that have no place in a practical, independent life—but it suits Georgie to the bone. Like it was made for her.

I eye the newel post as I start up the stairs because it’s shaped like a grinning dragon and I’ve never understood it. The Wildes are the least fanciful people alive. Pragmatism and quiet determination would be our coat of arms if we had such a thing, but we’re Midwesterners, thank you. Coats of arms are far too showy.

The dragon grins at me like it knows things I don’t.

“That is unlikely,” I tell it, then close my eyes, despairing of myself.

There is no room in my life for the kind of whimsy that results in discussions with inanimate objects. Especially a dragon. A sometimes creepy dragon who hunches at the foot of the banister like he’s guarding the house.

“Stop it,” I mutter at myself—and possibly at him—as I head upstairs.

Once on the third floor, I eye Georgie’s library door as I pass it, itching to get in there and establish some order, but sometimes friendship comes before logic. Or intelligible shelving systems. At the end of the hall, her bedroom door is ajar, and I can see Georgie herself sitting on the wood-planked floor facing the two huge turret windows that take up most of the outside wall. They are flung wide open to the cool spring air and she has her face lifted to the sunrise.

Her curly red hair swirls around her, and she’s wearing enough bracelets on her wrist to perform a symphony of tinkling metal sounds. Like the half hippie, half free spirit she claims to be.

Georgie’s family also has roots in Puritan Massachusetts witch trials but unlike me, she loves getting lost in all that witchcraft nonsense. She pretends she has various supernatural powers to annoy me, but mostly she likes the trappings. What she solemnly calls crystal lore and sage burning. She likes to talk to her cat as if he can understand her and claims his meows are detailed replies that she, naturally, can comprehend perfectly. And she steadfastly claims to believe that Ellowyn, one of our other closest friends, can brew teas that cure colds, repair broken hearts, and curse weak-willed men.

There’s something comforting about how Georgie wholeheartedly embraces the silliness, like this daily ritual of hers. The morning light streams in, making the colorful crystals she’s arranged around her in a circle glow.

As I stand in the doorway, she gets to her feet and begins to collect her debris. Her crystals are the only item she owns that I have ever seen her keep in some kind of order. I used to try to help her pick up the various rocks, but she would tell me things like I put the malachite with the quartz and everyone knows that’s wrong, or that reds and blues shouldn’t touch on Wednesdays, obviously. I finally gave up.

I’ll admit that sometimes I have to shove my hands in my pockets to keep from helping again anyway.

“What brings you to my lair this early in the morning?” she asks without looking at me. I know this is to give the impression that she divined my presence when it’s more likely she heard the creaky board out in the hallway.

She does something dramatic with her fingers in the air, and at the same time a breeze shifts through the wind chimes she has hanging in her windows. A funny little coincidence.

I ignore it. “You’re free tonight, right?”

“Sadly no. In a shocking twist that will surprise everyone who’s ever met me or seen me attempt to dance, I’m running away to Spain, where I will dedicate myself to the study of flamenco. And possibly also tapas and wine.”

In other words, yes, she’s free.

“I need to call a meeting.”

Georgie sighs and looks over her shoulder at me. “Not every get-together needs to be a meeting with a cause.”

I smile winsomely at her. “But some do.”

“Is this about those flyers I helped you put up yesterday?”

I smile even more broadly. If there was an award for best flyer, that one would win it. But then, I’m excellent at flyers. “That flyer was about the new and improved Redbud Festival, Georgie.”

“Yes, I know. I also know that anytime you try to new and improve something in this town, the plague that is Skip Simon descends on you like the locust he is.”

“He hasn’t. Yet.”

“But he will.”

He will. He always does.

I sigh. “Yes, he will. He can’t resist. But I don’t want to fight him.” This time is implied. “I want to find a way to get through to him. Preferably without embarrassing him in front of the whole town.”

Because the only thing I’ve ever been able to do when it came to Skip Simon, from another old and well-to-do local family here in St. Cyprian like mine, was embarrass him.

Publicly.

His unearned victory against me in fourth grade notwithstanding.

There was the kickball game. You’d think a grown man wouldn’t still be mad that a girl had accidentally smashed his face with a kickball in gym class, both breaking his nose and making him the laughingstock of the fifth grade, but Skip had brought it up at least twice in the past six months alone.

There was the olive branch incident. Except it wasn’t an olive branch. It was an extra helping of the fish sticks from the cafeteria that everyone knew he loved. I’d thought he’d find those fish sticks within the hour and maybe we could bury the hatchet. Instead, he’d come back from a week’s vacation—that he claimed was the flu, but he had a tan from lying on the beach in Mexico—to find everyone calling him Stinky Simon. And hadn’t believed I’d been out that same week because I really did come down with the flu before I could take the fish sticks offering back out of his locker.

There was the unfortunate field trip to Mark Twain’s Boyhood Home in Hannibal. The riverboat incident a year later. The ninth-grade intercom thing that even my own friends didn’t entirely believe was an accident, but how was I supposed to know that it could be so easily turned on? Or that Skip and his freshman year girlfriend would choose to use that room to make out in?

Classmates made unfortunate slurping sounds at him for years.

Then there’d been prom. Our parents had urged us to go together despite the many years of discord. They thought our two old St. Cyprian families should be friendlier, and obviously my rebellious sister wasn’t the one to approach for cordiality of any kind. And when they’d had a few drinks, our parents tended to wax rhapsodic about how they’d always had hopes for Skip and me.

Neither Skip nor I shared these hopes.

But we’d agreed all the same, because St. Cyprian is a small town. And because it made sense to make an effort. Okay, that was me, but he was briefly less jerky about things. We even called our awkward plans peace talks.

Then I stood him up.

It was an accident, but no one believed that.

My position, then and now, is that when your always-problematic sister “loses” your favorite science teacher’s chinchilla, you can hardly be concerned about a dance. You initiate search and rescue, in a prom dress, because it’s the poor, lost chinchilla that matters. And given that I was the one who found Mr. Churchilla, you’d think Skip would have forgiven me.

But he didn’t. Especially when the rumor went around that I’d always plotted to stand him up. As if I would descend to playing teen rom-com movie games with Skip. Plus, there was another rumor that Skip himself had actually been planning to embarrass me with something far more cringeworthy than his choice of white tuxedo.

I wish I could say we’d left such silly adolescent issues behind, but on the day of Skip’s coronation—I mean, election, if you could call it that when his grand and formidable mother basically forced everyone she knows into voting for her precious spoiled baby—as mayor of St. Cyprian, I led a town cleanup service project. I had no idea the cleaning substance we’d used in the community center would make the floor abnormally slippery. I was wearing shoes with decent treads.

But Skip was not. He tripped, fell flat on his face and, yes, broke his nose again.

Yes, he blamed me.

The harder I tried to be nice to Skip, the worse I seemed to embarrass him. Over time, he moved on from any actual incidents to simply blaming me by rote. If there is any bad word breathed about him on the cobbled streets of St. Cyprian, he assumes it’s my fault.

But he’s the mayor. What mayor is universally adored? Welcome to politics.

An argument he does not find compelling, sadly. I’ve tried.

Skip might not believe this, but while he can certainly schmooze with the best of them, he isn’t liked by all and sundry. He is mayor here because his family is powerful and because he vowed to keep the town as it is. The sad truth is, no matter how many progressive folks live here, a great many people in the greater St. Cyprian area are afraid of change.

That doesn’t mean they like Skip personally. Yet somehow the blame for any negativity aimed at him or his office or his campaign gets put on my shoulders. When he decides I’m wrong, which is pretty much anytime I get out there and try to change things for the better, he really goes after me.

This is why I need my friends to help me brainstorm ways to deal with Skip’s eventual, inevitable response to my new ideas for the Redbud Festival. Because I’m certainly not going to stop trying to improve St. Cyprian and its tourist-attracting, revenue-producing festivals to appease Mayor Stinky Simon. 

Excerpted from Small Town, Big Magic by Hazel Beck. Copyright © 2022 by Megan Crane and Nicole Helm. Published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

Buy Small Town, Big Magic at Amazon

Enjoyed this post? Never miss out on future posts by following us. Get even more book news in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter today! Girl Who Reads is an Amazon advertising affiliate; a small commission is earned when purchases are made at Amazon using any Amazon links on this site. Thank you for supporting Girl Who Reads.