Last Call at Willow Creek Exchange
A Verse Novel of the Final Switchboard Operator

About this book:

In the hushed room above Willow Creek's hardware store, Clara has spent three decades as the town's nervous system—every birth, death, secret, and scandal passing through the brass plugs and cotton-wrapped cords of her switchboard. She knows the electrical signature of each farmhouse: the wet cough of Line 14 grounding in rain, the crisp bell-tone of new copper on Line 108, the way Mrs. Gable's kitchen clock ticks behind her earpiece. But autumn brings the men in gray suits from Chicago, measuring poles and whispering *cutover*—the word that means dial tone, automation, the end of the operator. As the final season unfolds, Clara tends the board with the devotion of a priestess, knowing each connection she patches is a thread in a tapestry soon to be cut.

Written in luminous free verse that hums with the static and poetry of copper wire, *Last Call at Willow Creek Exchange* transforms a vanishing technology into a meditation on memory, community, and the quiet labor that holds a world together. Danielle Sosin makes the tactile intimate—the ache of a lead-weighted cord, the scent of paraffin and ozone, the weight of a headset becoming "a lead crown, a third ear"—while building toward a reckoning that feels both inevitable and devastating. This is historical fiction at its most sensory: a love letter to the women who were the invisible infrastructure of rural America, and a portrait of one operator's final shift that rings with the clarity of a bell on a clear copper line.

For readers of *The Giver of Stars* and *The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek* who crave the music of poetry with the drive of a novel, this verse masterpiece captures a disappearing way of life in language as precise and beautiful as the switchboard itself. When the last plug is pulled and the dial tone replaces the human voice, what remains is a story that will stay connected to you long after the final page.