This is a continuation of Card's alternate history series about Alvin Maker in his version of early America. Card blends in historical figures, magic and Alvin's effect on the colonies to make an intriguing history. Unfortunately, this book feels a little less finished than the others, almost as if Alvin has something else to do, that even he doesn't know about. Still good reading. ( )

Easily the worst Alvin Maker book so far. It feels a little like he's writing it just to get on with wrapping up the series. ( )

The Crystal City is the sixth book in an eventual seven book series called The Tales of Alvin Maker. I'd been waiting for it since 1998 so I was very excited when it was released this past November. This review tells quite a lot of the story but nothing that would ruin the suspense because there is no suspense..and that's the problem.

I started reading the Tales of Alvin Maker series by Orson Scott Card in 1987 with the first volume, Seventh Son. A fantasy alternative telling of American history in the frontier days, the first novel thrilled me by introducing me to the people of Hatrack River, many of whom had interesting magical "knacks" such as second sight, dousing, healing, or hexes, potions, come-hithers, glamours and all manner of other tantalizing folk magic talents. It is here that we meet the baby Alvin Miller, born the seventh son of a seventh son, who grows to possess the greatest knack of all. Alvin is what is known as a "Maker." He has the magical ability of understanding how things are put together, how to create and how to heal and repair things when they are broken. He can penetrate the minds of animals and people and get them to do his bidding. He can rearrange the molecules in an object and change its shape and function. He can create a storm or calm one down. Throughout the series Alvin's talents develop as he grows older and his modesty, honesty and kindness develop in similar measure. He becomes Alvin Maker and meets up with many figures from history along the way. He has adventures that shape the course of history. His family and community relationships deepen and take the reader on myriad interesting journeys.

The author released Volume II, Red Prophet in 1988 and Volume III, Prentice Alvin in 1989. So far so good. There was only a gap of about one year between installments and thankfully so because the books definitely left one hanging. Alvin had gone on to become a powerful and well-intended magus who had a vision of a Crystal City where one day he would gather all those with good hearts and teach them the ways of Makery so they could work together to build a world of peace and harmony.

Even though it was obvious that Card, a devout Mormon was fashioning an allegorical story based upon the life of his religion's founder, Joseph Smith, his story-telling while filled with spiritual concepts refrained from outright religiosity and at least for me, the author's spiritual beliefs didn't effect my enjoyment of the tale in any way. The plots can all be enjoyed on several levels and at the very least make up a very good yarn and a very creative alternate history. The characters are interesting. Their special "knacks" are fun to experience. Alvin as the most powerful Maker of them all is pitted against the formidable foe, the Unmaker...obviously the Devil, Satan, Chaos, what have you...who tries to trip him up at every step and comes close to killing him many times.

The fourth book in the series, Alvin Journeyman wasn't released until 1995, six years after its predecessor. By that time I could barely remember any details from the first three books but I remembered that I enjoyed them and so I eagerly read it as soon as it was released. By the time of this book Card has stretched Alvin's knack to the point where he has created a plowshare made of "living" gold that he will use to break ground when he finds the place where he is to build his Crystal City. Religion has become less subtle and more overt as the saga continues. Never mind, I sometimes found it a bit cloying but the story-telling had me hooked.

Another gap of three years this time brings us to 1998 and the release of Book V, Heartfire in which Peggy, a girl who has known Alvin literally since birth is now married to him. Peggy is a "Torch" and can see into each person's heart and can trace their future life lines to see what is in store for their lives. She sees war down the lifelines of every American as she predicts the coming Civil War. Sadly, I've forgotten so much about the nuances of the stories over the eleven years that I've been waiting for Card to get to the point that I no longer really care much about Alvin's Crystal City. The spiritual vibes have finally started to seem like religiosity to me and while I continued reading mainly to see how it all turns out, I picked up this fifth book with less excitement than before. Still Card managed to win me over and get me back on track only to leave me hanging yet again until six MORE years have passed and it's November of 2003.

With a title like The Crystal City, the news of this book's impending release filled me with anticipation. I was almost jubilant! At last, I thought, Alvin's going to get to build his city. Alas, the book does not deliver what the title promises. Instead Alvin starts the work on his crystal city but we have to wait, (how many more years?) until the final Book VII, Master Alvin makes its appearance to find out how it all ends.

I really, really did not like this book. When I read Seventh Son back in 1987 if I had known how badly this series was going to go down hill to the point of ending up with the rushed and over-zealous, predictable and uninteresting, at times racist, at times down-right silly concoction that this turned out to be, I would not have read it at all even though for many years it was one of my favorite books. I truly wish I had known then what I know now.

The plot in The Crystal City finds Alvin and his brother-in-law Arthur Stuart in Nuevos Barcelona or New Orleans under Spanish occupation. Alvin's been sent there by his wife Peggy who sees that he can possibly prevent the Civil War by going there. In the second chapter we are introduced to Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel, two abolitionists that know Peggy and who run a sort of illegal orphanage for poor French orphans, and black and half-breed children. If the idea of a squirrel and a moose sounds vaguely familiar to you from the days of Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, it's not a coincidence. One of Card's fans won a contest that promised as its prize that Card would name a character in his next book after him. The fan's online name was Papa Moose and his wife's online identity was Squirrel because they liked Rocky and Bullwinkle. So that silliness is how two serious and important characters in this book got such strange and unlikely names. To me this is a good indicator of the lack of seriousness with which Card treated this book.

In this book Alvin treats a Portuguese prostitute who is stricken with Yellow Fever. He makes her well enough to fight off the disease on her own but not before mosquitoes carry her diseased blood to thousands of other people starting a plague and a superstitious panic. He meets up with various other local characters with interesting knacks such as a Voodoo Queen and a girl who can tell when someone is dying. He also comes up against his old nemesis Jim Bowie (yeah, the guy with the big knife), Steve Austin (of Texas fame) and his own youngest brother, Calvin, also a maker but with no discipline and no humility and plenty of "issues." The Unmaker is lurking around, too.

The main event in this book is to get 5,000 to 6,000 impoverished French immigrants, runaway slaves and ex-slaves and the orphans of Squirrel and Moose out of Nuevos Barcelona and away to safety as the hateful mob rises up to murder them all in blame for the plague. Luckily, Alvin knows Abe Lincoln, who in the course of this book meets a friend of Alvin's who turns him on to the lawyer profession. Abe helps figure out where all these people can go to live in peace and safety after Alvin turns the waters of the Mississippi River into a crystal bridge by draining his own blood into the waters. A county is created in Abe's home state of Noisy River (Illinois) and Alvin with the help of his living plow of gold carves out the foundation for the Crystal City. (By the way, the plow can float in mid air, moving with a mind of its own and people can see this but they don't freak out.) Alvin creates the crystal blocks from which the city is to be built by mixing his own blood with the waters as he did when he made the crystal bridge across the Mississippi River. The crystal reflects back mysterious clairvoyant visions whenever someone looks into it.

There is a sub-plot that has Jim Bowie and Steve Austin and bad boy Calvin trying to defeat the blood-thirsty Mexica Indians and take over as Emperors.

In order to get all the escaped people from Louisiana to Illinois Alvin puts them in the charge of Arthur Stuart who is learning to be a maker. They run into many tight spots on the road to freedom but of course the super handy knacks always win the day...like melting gun barrels so they won't fire and talking alligators into chasing after people and of course, parting the Mississippi and drying up the river bottom so people can walk across it. They heal a few sick slave-owners along the way and release many hundreds more slaves. All goes entirely too hunky-dory for my taste. It was just plain predictable and boring.

We meet up with the Red Prophet, Tenskwa-Tawa from the second book. He is now in charge of all lands west of the Mississippi and is...well, a red prophet. He has been busy uniting all the tribes and converting them from warring enemies to a unified people of peace. He's been cooking up a powerful volcano that's going to blow the Mexica Indians to smithereens if they don't come over to the peace side and give up their reliance upon the power drawn from fear and pain and blood sacrifices. The Voodoo Queen is helping out with this. Tenskwa-Tawa grants Alvin's band of escapees safe passage across his Indian lands and his people feed and shelter the escapees along the way.

Meanwhile, Peggy is about to give birth to Alvin's son who comes prematurely and as if Alvin doesn't have enough on his plate, he has to heal the baby as it's being born because it's lungs aren't developed enough. He tried healing their first baby unsuccessfully when it too was born early.

The story jumps back and forth between several different plot elements and it seemed to me that Card rushed through all of it. There was nothing new or exciting. Every hardship or obstacle encountered by the "good guys" was solved in the moments by their knacks. Everyday people seemed quite unconcerned by the knacks, floating plows, and mysterious fogs that came up out of nowhere. Crystal bridges were happily crossed by thousands upon thousands of refugees without a thought. Card justs seemed to think that just because he says so, that's good enough for the readership. This was totally implausible even for a fantasy story. The characters were not developed. The plot was moved along by dialog as is especially common with Card but the dialog in this book was amateurish and stilted and seemed forced. He even used the word "pis sed-offedness" once and described a group of women who were meeting to discuss the city's name as a "gaggle". Here's the actual first three sentences of that enlightening paragraph, "But Measure left the work and came along. And when they got to Alvin's cabin, there inside it were a gaggle of women." Shouldn't that be "there inside it was a gaggle of women"? I think the goose connotation is a bit unnecessary.

Various tribes of Native Americans are discussed with simplistic racist tones. The "Irrakwa and the Cherriky" are painted to be sell-outs wearing white man's clothes who once were blood-thirsty varmints who like the Mexica Indians used the magic of fear and pain and death. The Navajo are just about subdued and taught the error of their likewise bloody ways against the Hopi by the Red Prophet. The Plains Indians are portrayed as beings who harken to the Greensong, a magical mysterious song of Nature that allows them to run faster and jump higher (kind of like Keds or Red Ball Jets). I loved the concept of the Greensong when it was first introduced in book two and I still do but in this book it is used so cheaply as an easy way to get from improbable Point A to ridiculous Point B that it seemed stripped of all its magic. I realize this is a fantasy and that it is an imaginary alternate vision of history, but in real life there are real Native Americans with real spirituality and I found the heavy handed and simplistic explanations of Native spirituality disrespectful, racist and ill-conceived. How does Mr. Card think a young person of Mayan descent will enjoy his simplistic portrayal of Native Americans? Or how will a person of Navajo descent feel or "Irrakwas" like my friends here in Wisconsin, the Oneidas? His portrayal of black people is paternalistic and not well balanced either.

Alvin's character has become a crashing bore in this book. He is just too perfect. He makes mistakes like curing the prostitute which leads to thousands more dying from the plague but he is always so focused on his duty. He is so long-suffering, so pristine in his motivations. Even when the Unmaker attacks him by taking over the body of a gator that rips his leg out of the socket Alvin keeps it together and continues on his journey to the Crystal City. He is careful not to hurt the poor misused gator. We never doubt it for a single second that all the good guys will triumph over all the bad guys...always and forever. By this book Alvin is no longer even a likable human being. He's pious and as sweet and gentle as a lamb and about as interesting. His relationship with his wife Peggy has deteriorated into nothing..no passion, nothing much of joy...just their interminable duties to their knacks and their visions.

Finally, after Alvin has led everyone to his promised land and the building of the Crystal City has begun, the ladies of the community get together and they decide to name this new city that they are about to help build, Tabernacle. Okay. It's Card's book, not mine...but I didn't think I was signing on for a religion class when I bought the first book in the Sci-Fi /Fantasy section of my local book store way back when. There was no indication that it was going to be a religious series. The following is a sample of the religious tone of the book. Decide for yourself if you like the tone. I did not.
"What's the topic?" asked Alvin.
"The name of that thing what you build," said La Tia.
"I don't like what Verily call it, me."
Peggy laughed. "Nobody likes what anybody calls it," she said. "But La Tia was reading in the Bible and she has a name."
"You lead us out like Moses," said La Tia. "And Arthur Stuart, he lead us like Joshua when you gone. Not like Aaron, no! We got no golden calf! But we the book of Exodus, us. So this thing you build, I find out in the Bible, she a tabernacle."
Alvin frowned. "Makes it sound like a church meeting place."
"Oui!" cried Rien. "Only instead of you go and a priest pretend to be God, we go inside and find out where he live in our heart!"

This book was such a let-down for me with it's convoluted but skimmed over plot that I'm not even sure I'll read the last book when it comes out. I have counted Orson Scott Card among my top favorite writers for many years and I have read most of his books. This one is the absolute biggest disappointment. What should have been a triumphant story petered out to become just a preachy, hurried half-effort that I sadly cannot recommend to anyone but true die-hard fans of the Alvin Maker series. ( )

Certainly not the strongest of the series, but still a necessary read to understand all of Card's authoring capabilities. I personally felt as though the characters lost all of the drive of the former books once the ending was in sight. This was sad and disappointing, given that the "end" of the series was not necessarily final. Rather, it was a closing of a journey and the beginning of real growth. (This reader appreciates that kind of ending, making me realize that a character's life can continue even though I am no longer a witness to it.)

The characters just kind of dwindled into what they had been. Perhaps the lesson was that a person needs to learn to accept their true personality in order to find fulfillment... I want to see more from a novel, though. ( )

http://www.amazon.com/review/RT75YMFV... ( )