Card's fantasy series, "Tales of Alvin Maker," got off to a delightful bang with Seventh Son, which introduced an alternate early America where folk magics such as healing and dowsing really work. A nation still inchoate, its independent states are a crazy quilt, some rebellious while others remain loyal to a variety of European countries, some repressive while others grant native American Indians citizenship. This second volume finds an exiled Napoleon in Detroit, dreaming of empire and glory while Governor William Henry Harrison is plotting his own future on the graves of red Americans. Between these forces are the native followers of two brothers, the warrior Ta-Kumsaw and the pacifist prophet of the title, Tenskwa-Tawa. With its preachy tone, tepid mysticism and forced coincidences, this sequel, though interesting, doesn't live up to its predecessor. Card recently won the Hugo Award two years in a row, the first time a novel (Ender's Game) and its sequel (Speaker for the Dead) have both taken top honors.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader Reviews
Book II of Card's Alvin Maker fantasy alternative history of frontier America covers some of the same ground as in Book I, Seventh Son, but now through different eyes. Rather than the mostly idyllic and rational vision of the white man's world-that-was-or-might-be, centered on Alvin's family, this story mostly gives us the Red man's view of white oppression versus working to live together. White's forest clearance vs. Red's forest custodianship is the most powerfully expressed metaphor of the contrast, while the black, Unmaker, rivers run through. Certain central events in Alvin's numinous awakening to his powers in the first novel are now seen from an unsuspected "other" side, not that of the Devil as the intolerant Rev. Thrower would have it, but from the native Shaw-Nee or Kicky-Poo side of the rivers. This book includes a version of Tippecanoe, the massacre that made William Harrison our President, that chills the blood. Card has an especially different take on liberty-loving Lafayette, an associate here of Napoleon rather than dead Washington! Really, these amazing shifts in view on American political icons are one of the great appeals of this series. The other appeal, of course, is that Card is an imaginative teller of tales. He infuses this tale with a mythic, sometimes elegiac and mystical, quality, despite dialogue cast in backwoods provincial patois. Card is imagining a more hopeful frontier experience, among Hoosier "hill-billys," where the green hope of the Reds and their Napoleon is crushed finally. The story has become fiercer, bleaker and more desperate. It can be hard going because attention is not always on the central character, but digresses into sweeping quasi-historical tangents that only eventually feed back in to the "main story"--if that really is Alvin. I suspect the more you know of frontier history in the old Northwest Territory (after the East Coast Revolution and before the Cowboy Frontier of the West), the more fun these stories will be. That adds a level of detection to the interest of the story. The similarity here to Card's totally brilliant ENDERS GAME is the coming of age of another boy, who also struggles with "swarms" and powers whose strength is only slowly revealed.
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