Emily Edwards has a simple life as the town witch of Lost
Pine, doing what she can to bring in a living by doing her
small magics and helping out the townsfolk. An arrogant
Warlock named Dreadnaught Stanton from New York city has the
nerve to be studying her and Pap's form of folk magic, all
the while lecturing her on something she has been doing for
years, and quite well, too.
That quiet life gets complicated fast when, through a
concatenation of events, Emily ends up with a magic-sucking
sacred stone embedded in her hand and accompanying Mr.
Stanton to San Francisco to consult with the closest center
for the Mirabilis Institute, his Alma Mater of sorts.
As harrowing as the journey is, with encounters ranging from
fighting off magically-mutated forest creatures and a night
pent with Indians, it is only the beginning of the adventure
as it becomes clear the stone is of interest to many, and
most of them won't care for the inconvenience of Emily's
attachment to it.
Having honed her craft via her short stories, Hobson has
produced a polished, rich first novel. THE HIDDEN STAR is
rife with derring-do, melding Steampunk bones with the flesh
of magic, based in a bedrock-logical alternate reality.
Touches like a great Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia
and imaginatively complex examples of 19th century
mechanicals married to the use of various forms of magically
generated power add to the fun, while the suspense and
action mounts leading to a grandly satisfactory conclusion.
Book 2 in the series, The Hidden Goddess, is due out
in April of this year, and I can't wait to read it.
It’s 1876, and business is rotten for Emily Edwards, town
witch of the tiny Sierra Nevada settlement of Lost Pine.
With everyone buying patent magicks by mail-order, she’s
faced with two equally desperate options. Starve—or use a
love spell to bewitch the town’s richest lumberman into
marrying her.
When the love spell goes terribly wrong, Emily is forced to
accept the aid of Dreadnought Stanton—a pompous and
scholarly Warlock from New York—to set things right.
Together, they travel from the seedy underbelly of San
Francisco’s Barbary Coast, across the United States by
train and biomechanical flying machine, to the highest
halls of American magical power, only to find that love
spells (and love) are far more complicated and dangerous
than either of them could ever have imagined.
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