Flannery's Reviews > The Native Star

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 Native Star 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 Native Star. 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 The Hidden Goddess sooner rather than later.