The Native Star (2010)

Opening: "Five loud, hard, sharp crashes. Someone was knocking--no, not knocking, rather pounding at the door of Mr. Everdene Baugh's house on Church Street."

This is a slightly misleading opening, mostly because Mr. Everdene Baugh disappears after the prologue, never to be seen again. Though he begins the story, it is really about Emily Edwards and Dreadnought Stanton. After a series of spectacularly bad decisions and unhappy events, Emily is forced to leave the town she grew up with Mr. Stanton. They end up journeying across the US, from San Francisco to New York, wreaking havoc along the way.

The good old journey story is obviously a key factor here. Our main characters are on a literal physical journey, but also on a personal one. In this case, the final showdown comes after they reach New York, but the journey itself is what sets up the whole thing, both plotwise and in terms of character development.

The central image of the story is the magical stone that becomes part of Emily's hand. I found this somewhat disturbing and creepy, as I think it was meant to be. At the same time, it was a very difficult image for me to grasp somehow. It just never quite made sense, and yet I'm at somewhat of a loss to explain what about it was bothersome.

The main relationship in this story is between Dreadnought and Emily (though her parents, real and foster, are important as well). I found it fulfilling, but not ultimately surprising or particularly original. I had called it from the first time Dreadnought appears. That said, there are times where a predictable romance is fine. And in this case it didn't fall into the instant-attraction theme we're suffering under currently.

All in all, I didn't feel unhappy with the book, but I didn't feel impressed either, and I wanted to be. Once again, it was a book where I felt like the concept was great and the result wasn't quite what I wanted it to be. I'm beginning to think that this genre is just like that for me--the idea will always seem shinier than the execution. In short, I always want to like the steampunky books, and I rarely actually do.

However, if you do like steampunk, I think this would be a fabulous book. It doesn't have the egregious annoyances that you sometimes encounter, and the story and characters are largely fulfilling and enjoyable. It has a nice flavor, with the California mining towns, the two cities, and the journey between them.

Book source: public library
Book information: Ballantine, 2010; adult (there wasn't anything particularly shocking, although there is a fair amount of violence; upper teens might also enjoy it)
Recommended by: The Book Smugglers ( )

I get ridiculously animated when I am excited about books and boy, you should’ve seen me explaining this book to people I encountered in real life who asked me what I was reading. “There’s this woman who lives in backwoods California in the late 1800s but in, like, a slightly different universe with all sorts of magic. So she and her pa, who isn’t really related to her, are the local witch and warlock who create hexes and spells for people and their business is in trouble from a mail order company. Also, there is this badass-type warlock from a hoity-toity magic school and no one really knows why he’s in their town. So Emily, that’s the woman, in the very beginning she creates a love spell that goes wrong and then there are mining zombies, huge, shambling rodents and then all sorts of wild west stuff, a long train ride, and ancient magic and villains and …” Cue a confused look on my friends’ faces. That was understandable because [b:Native Star|7236997|The Native Star (The Native Star, #1)|M.K. Hobson|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51PoPBCAiPL._SL75_.jpg|8154069] truly is a combination of so many genres. The book is fun in the same way as Firefly, only Firefly is sci-fi western and this is wild, west fantasy. Both of them have fun romantic plots and I really dug the dialogue between Emily and Dreadnought:

“I’ve wanted you ever since I saw you dancing naked under that damn oak tree, botching up that preposterous love spell.”

Emily jabbed an accusing finger at him. “So you did see me!”

“It was an appalling spectacle,” he said, “I enjoyed it tremendously.” (Loc. 5576)

Native Star was tightly plotted for the most part, though it gets a little flustered in last portion. I found myself rereading portions of the climactic scenes for clarity, especially when the author alluded to events and characters that hadn’t been mentioned since the very first pages of the novel. Scatterbrained people like me who read several books at once might find it a bit hard to remember everything and everyone at times. Truly, there was very little that I didn’t enjoy in [b:Native Star|7236997|The Native Star (The Native Star, #1)|M.K. Hobson|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51PoPBCAiPL._SL75_.jpg|8154069]. Perhaps the only problems I had at all were the number of characters with secondary or hidden motivations and the number of villains. But the author doesn’t take herself too seriously and her fun is the reader’s enjoyment.

This book is the perfect example of a novel that might’ve gone under my radar had it not been for several glowing reviews by friends of mine on Goodreads. I even bought the second book before I’d read the first because I was pretty positive I’d enjoy it. I will be reading [b:The Hidden Goddess|9515638|The Hidden Goddess (The Native Star, #2)|M.K. Hobson|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51xCxy1JzML._SL75_.jpg|14401470] sooner rather than later.
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I think I’m going to have to give this another reread. I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t seem to get into this book. I don’t hate it, but I didn’t completely love it either. And I really wanted to love it. Just…nothing was grabbing at me.

I do like Emily as Our Protagonist. She could very easily have been the shrieking damsel, but she manages to hold her own against the bad guys. I like that even with the stone embedded in her hand, Emily’s not ridiculously overpowered, and she and Dreadnaught have to come up with solutions to get around the lack of magic issues. And I like that she actually takes responsibility for her actions and deals with the consequences of them. Emily does have fairly good reasons for wanting to marry Dag, but wants to be absolutely sure that he’ll be hers. It’s not ethical, but once she’s called out on it, Emily does stand up and tries to set things right. Also, she’s hilariously inept at disguises, which I loved.

Dreadnaught Stanton (aside from his front-runner status for the best Awesome McCool name ever) didn’t really appeal to me. He’s…okay. There’s the whole deadpan snarker with a dark secret angle, but I didn’t really get anything new or different from Stanton as a character. He plays off of Emily well, but I didn’t see the chemistry between the two. And from what we do get of his backstory, I really wanted to delve more into that instead of “…Well, moving on!” Again, I don’t hate him, it’s just not doing anything for me.

The plot’s a little cluttered. There’s a couple good twists and turns, but it does get to the point where I was mixing up exactly who was chasing Emily at moments. Sometimes it works, as Dreadnaught and Emily’s escape plans boil down to hightailing out of whatever location they’re in at the moment, but with the frequency it happens, we never get to catch our breaths. (I do like that Stanton has a Bank Bag of Holding which he promptly loses. It’s a nice little detail used for a joke.) Plus, plot threads get dropped so quickly—again, due to the aforementioned hightailing—but we never get the full weight of the plot or what it means for our heroes. And I never got a sense of the world we’re reading about either. Yes, there’s witches and warlocks and they’re integrated into society and there’s fringe groups attacking them, but I never really got the impact magic has on this society. The magical organizations feel more like gentlemen’s clubs, and I really wanted to see magic being actually integrated into everyday life, especially once the setting moved toward the Eastern US. There’s a lot of potential to work with here, but it doesn’t feel realized. (But more of Penelope Pendennis and the Witches’ Friendly Society, because she was awesome. I loved her.)

My other issue with the book is the epilogue. I thought that the end with Emily proposing to Stanton was fine, and there’s enough dropped hints throughout the book to get me interested in the book. The epilogue just feels tacked on, as if the author wants to say “HEY REMEMBER ALL OF THIS STUFF WE’VE BEEN MENTIONING? LET ME TELL YOU ALL ABOUT IT.” The epilogue’s not really a great set-up to the next book, as it pretty much gives away all of the mystery surrounding Emily’s past and a very real threat that was treated as a joke. And that doesn’t really make me interested in reading the next book because I already know what’s going to happen.

If it wasn’t for the epilogue, I would have really liked this book a lot more. It’s still a decent read, and does give an interesting at alternate US history. But I think there’s a lot of wasted potential, and the expositional epilogue really knocked down my enjoyment of this.
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I can't decide whether or not I like the misogyny and racism. It's actually refreshing to have a main character with beliefs that are true to the period rather than identical to the author's. I gave up on Boneshaker rather quickly because of all the anachronisms including the way people treated each other. However, Hobson is rather heavy handed. All of the period attitudes sit there and scream "Hello! I'm here! Look at me!" rather than being a quiet "Yes, that's just the way it is, don't you agree?" And then, instead of dealing with any of the issues she's brought up in any meaningful way, she just moves on to the next topic of interest.

The quiet voice that takes things for granted creates atmosphere. The loud voice declaring its presence creates expectations. I'm not a strict holder of the Chekov’s Gun philosophy, but if you give someone a gun and make a big deal about giving him that gun, it better be of some sort of use somewhere in the book.

Actually, that's rather similar to how Hobson dealt with the zombies too. They jump into the text, wave around, make a bunch of noise, then are discarded. They're certainly interesting and have a great use and explanation but is the scant use she made of the zombies really worth that setup? For that matter, most of this interesting and detailed magic system didn't get used.

Hobson has a ton of really interesting and creative ideas, but she jams them all into the story without using the majority of them.

Also, the "I hate you but that really means I love you" is such a tiresome type of 'relationship'. ( )

The goodreads and Amazon descriptions for [b:The Native Star|7236997|The Native Star (Veneficas Americana, #1)|M.K. Hobson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320391438s/7236997.jpg|8154069] promise so many elements that it's hard to believe the novel could possibly deliver them all successfully: historical fiction, fantasy and magic, steampunk, western, and romance. And yet, this book is one of the rare cases when an idea that crosses so many genres and brings in many different aspects actually works well.

Emily Edwards is the local witch in a small town in California. The year is 1876, but this isn't quite the past that history books tell us about. Instead of being false accusations, it turns out that the witch trials were actually attempts to out real witches and warlocks, but in this alternate universe witchcraft has been legalized and magic is now an important part of the United States. However, not everyone is so accepting of it, and magic is also used illegally for criminal purposes or to manipulate people. Emily starts the story by deciding that the only way to save her and her father from their financial problems is to cast a love spell on a wealthy local man. Unfortunately, things don't go quite to plan, and before Emily can put things right she finds herself with a strange magic-absorbing stone embedded in her palm that prevents her from using magic and reversing the love spell.

Reluctantly teaming up with the insufferable warlock, Dreadnought Stanton, Emily must set out across the country to have the stone removed so she can eventually put things right again. However, the stone is far more valuable than Emily could have foreseen, and it turns out that just about everyone wants to get their hands on it. As Emily and Stanton flee for their lives, their relationship goes from barely tolerating one another to a begrudging friendship to something a little deeper. It's the kind of romance I enjoy reading, the kind that is built up slowly and steadily and had me caring about the characters first.

This is a really good fantasy historical steampunk western romance. The world Ms Hobson has created is vivid and easily imaginable. I like how she has cleverly woven magic into history and mixed it up with a touch of real life events and people - like President Grant - but kept it very fresh and exciting at the same time. The tone is mostly light-hearted and the pacing felt just right, I'm really really glad that I already have [b:The Hidden Goddess|9515638|The Hidden Goddess (Veneficas Americana, #2)|M.K. Hobson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320472504s/9515638.jpg|14401470] waiting for me. ( )