An Alternate History with deep fantasy roots: a review of M.K. Hobson’s The Native Star.

 

California in the 1870's is a coarse place, and Emily Edwards, the heroine of M.K. Hobson's The Native Star, is a hardworking salt-of-the-earth witch looking to trade up her dwindling business prospects for a life as wife to the town's most successful lumberman. She casts a love spell, and her world falls apart. Her fate collides with Warlock Dreadnought Stanton when the pair thwarts a mine full of zombie laborers. (Don’t drop this novel in the horror genre. The zombies only last one chapter, but monsters, human and otherwise, pepper this book.) A lump of magic-absorbing stone indelibly merges with Emily's hand during the scuffle, and Stanton persuades her to travel with him to find the leader of Stanton's magical order, a man who should be able to remove the stone from Emily's hand, freeing her to go home and work toward setting her magical wrongs to right.

 

The Native Star is a fantasy adventure of the first order, with a quick pace and deliciously cantankerous dialogue between Emily and Stanton - like this little exchange between the two as

they reunite, freshly washed after a filthy and exhausting time on the road:

 

He looked astonishingly stiff and sturdy, as if he was cut from pasteboard. "You look like a banker who never says yes to a loan," she said.

 

"And you look like a schoolmarm who never says yes to anything," he replied...

 

There are jabs aplenty between Stanton and Emily in this love-hate relationship. Both are remarkably flawed and yet balanced, ultimately redeeming characters. Each changes the other dramatically through the story; Stanton broadens the worldliness of Emily, who in turn takes much of the starch out of Stanton. Together they come to understand that power demands great respect and sacrifice, truth is subjective, as is morality, and love and security are not interchangeable.

 

In a tradition of witchery not seen since the likes Terry Pratchett's Discworld, author M.K. Hobson

provides readers a young woman of great emotional depth and maturity, and Hobson delights in toying with many of the more fascinating of Steampunk's themes: faith and belief, the clash of gender roles, propriety, technology, morality and self reliance. The novel's elements of environmentalism the

dangers of a militant government are a bit heavy handed at times, but all in all, the creativity of her "monsters" and her remarkable ability to set a scene with just a few well chosen words (some of which had me reaching for a dictionary and expanding my vocabulary), makes The Native Star a

wonderful read.

 

The Native Star, is the first novel by M..K. Hobson and will be available August 31, 2010 from Random House Publishers.       

 

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