Reposted from my Substack, Divine Speculations: Exploring Faith and Fantasy.

I am returning to the Tales of Alvin Maker series to catch up before Master Alvin, the final volume, is released in April 2026. While this series is sometimes reductively summarized as a Joseph Smith retelling, I think that summary does it a disservice. Card’s Homecoming Saga is much more a Book of Mormon retelling than this series is a Joseph Smith retelling.

While the series makes undeniable use of the matter of LDS history (along with Book of Mormon stories and American history), it’s much more intentional about transforming that material into something all its own. My overall impression is that this series is truly about envisioning a different version of history—both Mormon history and American history. While it would be too simple to say that it presents a perfected version of that history—there are still bad things happening and mistakes made—Card does present a version of history that imagines the purest possible motives for the heroes and shows them making the best choices that they can. I read the series as very much an examination of what it is to live within history and make the best choices we can as individuals.

Card said recently that Mormons are in fact the worst readers of this series, because they catch the Joseph Smith analogues, assume that they now know what the series is, and switch off their brains. Below are my casual reviews of each volume of the series, followed by my wishes/predictions for the final book in the series. My hope is to persuade those who have heard of the series but haven’t yet picked it up that these books have really interesting things to say and are worth your time, especially if you are interested in the speculative fiction version of Mormon thought.

Seventh Son

The first interesting thing I noticed in rereading Seventh Son was that the story weaves together both Joseph Smith’s story and incidents from the Book of Mormon. Taleswapper has some clear Moroni vibes with his collection of stories with a sealed portion, even though he is not the Shining Man who takes the place of Moroni in appearing to Alvin in the middle of the night and giving him is commission as a prophet/Maker.

That said, the series does a lot to transform Mormon history into its own most ideal version. For example, the character of Peggy adds a whole different dimension to Emma Smith, implying that her destiny and powers are nearly as great as her husband’s. This fits with an ethos that (I would say) only gradually grew in Latter-day Saint belief about the importance of marriage and the unit of the man and woman being necessary to the greatest works. And of course, the folk magical practices of early church leaders are not, in this world, something that to be ashamed of or wrestled with, but center-stage in the world, expected. What matters here is what people do with their knacks, not whether they work or not. Knacks are morally neutral.

The other interesting aspect of this series is how much the alternate history is in the background of the story but never quite becomes clear or important. The narrative alludes to lots of major departures from history, but it’s apparent that none of these necessarily sparked the story that we get to watch, which to my mind is the usual mode of alternate history. I need to dive deeper into exactly what changes have been made and why, but as I continued reading further on in the series, it seemed to me that Card was mostly just having a rollicking good time messing around with how history happened. He brings in his favorite historical figures seemingly at random, and gives them a story that’s still fitting with their character in reality, but 15-75 degrees to the side of where they were (can’t remember if it is mentioned in this book, but George Washington turns himself in for treason to the British crown and is beheaded). It’s a fascinating and fun approach to alternative history.

Red Prophet

I believe my previous attempt at reading the series stopped with this book for two reasons. First, I struggle with Card’s love of portraying absolutely brutal violence. Even if he always does it in pursuit of a theory of moral action and never for gratuitous enjoyment, I just don’t have the stomach for the detailed descriptions of pain and destruction. I honestly did have to stop reading and recover at several points this time around.

The second thing I struggled with my first time through was the amount of geopolitics going on. I was fascinated by the appearance of Napoleon in America, but I didn’t know enough details about American history to figure out who White Murderer Harrison was. I’m now more familiar with American history, and frankly our country is at a different place in reckoning with that history than we were 15 years ago. So I was more prepared to see why I should care about these plotlines, even though I found myself still wishing that the book would focus more on Alvin and his evolution.

Putting these two elements together, it’s apparent that from book 2 forward, each book in the series deals with a large problem in American history. This book’s issue is how the white settlers treated the native peoples. Card does this both by developing the spiritual relationship between Alvin and Tenskwa-Tawa and Ta-Kumsaw (via an endowment-like scene) and by bringing in a story from the Book of Mormon (the people of Ammon and their non-violent resistance). Through this, Card creates a world where white people and “red” people have to each confront who they want to be morally and who they actually have been. The ending of the massacre does somewhat strike as wish-fulfillment in terms of perfecting American history by forcing full responsibility on the individuals who committed the atrocities. I do like how it gets modulated in future books (with Harrison trying to twist the rhetoric of the curse). Card is also pulling here on early-LDS theology about the redemption and restoration of the native peoples of America, which he does perhaps more successfully in the short story “America” in Folk of the Fringe.

Anyway, I think this is the toughest volume in the series to read, though the next one also has its dose of absolutely horrific violence.

Prentice Alvin

That horrific violence is detailed descriptions of a white slave owner executing a plan to introduce as many half-black children into the world as possible, with exactly as much systematic rape as you would assume that would entail. The methodical planning and the morally repugnant theology behind it had me pausing and recovering from the novel several times.

However, these abhorrent scenes are clearly there for a moral reason: the historical issue this book deals with is slavery, and so dealing with the absolute brutality of American slavery is a must. There’s also a significant focus on the runaway slave laws and how having a different moral basis for adjacent states/countries is not really workable. Though the book doesn’t completely “solve” the problem (asking one book to unravel the whole problem of race in American culture would be unreasonable), it does make several interesting moves. I actually appreciate that it doesn’t have the kind of instant solution that Red Prophet did. Having read The People Could Fly with my kids during our year of pandemic homeschooling, I caught a lot of the references to African American folklore as well.

Again, there’s a fascinating collision between Mormon history and American history, as the scene where Alvin changes Arthur’s DNA is clearly modeled on Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery’s baptism. I’m glad a book written in 1989 had the good sense to call out how problematic it would have been for Alvin to just make Arthur white; the fact that he makes Arthur partly Alvin has other weird implications for later. It also shows exactly what (Card thinks?) was so revolutionary about Joseph Smith’s approach to religious power. He’s not hoarding it to himself; he wants to raise an entire church, an entire people, of prophets and seers. Only through a holy community can God’s ends be met. This theme will continue in throughout the series.

It’s also interesting that Peggy takes on the role of the school teacher who comes to help Alvin, another aspect of the Oliver Cowdery role, which seems divided between her and Arthur. Again, it’s fascinating what Card is doing with gender in Mormon history in these books. (Has someone written about this yet? I haven’t run the searches yet.)

Alvin Journeyman

Okay, Card is just showing off in this volume. I’m glad I read this book after being enough involved in Mormon studies to catch all the references that Card is making here. My jaw hit the floor when I realized that he was starting the plot of this book with Fanny Alger, and continuing on from there to tackle Joseph Smith’s court cases, the existence of the golden plates, and even the Salamander Letter. Yes, the historical issue this book deals with is a return to a more Mormon-focused topic: Joseph Smith’s character.

There’s lots of Card’s frequent mode of witty dialogue: the antagonists tie themselves in logical knots trying to figure out how to oppose Alvin without coming off as selfish (they are) which are quickly undone by the morally pure and hyper-intelligent protagonist. If you enjoy seeing Ender Wiggin demolish problems in Speaker for the Dead with love and logic, you’ll probably like the courtroom scene in this book.

But for me, the most fascinating part of the book is the storyline of Calvin, Alvin’s brother who has a lesser version of Alvin’s powers. As far as I can tell, Calvin’s adventures in the court of Napoleon are completely fictional, with no specific historical referents. They exist only to show Calvin as the version of Alvin who is actually what his legal opponents say he was. Yes, Calvin is evil Joseph Smith: manipulative, lustful, selfish, egotistical, desiring power for its own sake. The contrast between the two plotlines in ingenious. It sets up a clear question to the LDS reader who may be struggling with the larger view of church history coming to light in the 1990s: do you believe Joseph was like this or like that? Which person do you really think he was?

Heartfire

Heartfire is where this series seems to lose a bit of its focus. The major element of American history in this book is witch trials, but there’s also a strong secondary plot that follows up on the progress towards the abolition of slavery. It makes sense to have both elements, since Prentice Alvin dealt with slavery on a more personal level rather than on a country- or in this case continent-wide level. The magical America that Alvin posits cannot be perfected until slavery is eliminated–and I do see the focus of these books as a gradual process of perfecting America as a concept. Still, the split focus means that the book feels a little less punchy than the previous ones.

As my friend Paul Williams pointed out to me, the witch trials focus also feels a bit repetitive since we just had a trial-centric plot in Alvin Journeyman. Many of the plot beats are the same–Alvin waiting patiently in jail, the opposition being willing to bend or break the law in order to get a guilty verdict, Verily doing clever legal tricks. All true points. However, I was willing to forgive much of this because this witch trial is presided over by freakin’ John Adams, my favorite founding historical figure. (1776 is the best musical based on the revolution, and no, I will not be accepting questions at this time.) I was fascinated by Card’s vision of what Adams would have been without the revolution to animate him, and I was tickled watching him work through how to end witch trials with clever legal maneuvering. (On the other hand, I felt like the presence of John James Audubon turned out to be pretty pointless to the novel overall, but maybe that’s because I don’t care as much about him as a historical figure. Your mileage may vary.)

On the Peggy/Calvin/slavery plotline, the book makes some efforts to clarify why the various races seem to have such widely different innate magical gifts, which was a necessary step. I saw a lot of online reviews complaining about the “magical Indian” trope in the second book, which is fair, but I think Card’s worldbuilding in this book does some work to mitigate that. We get some more clear examples of Calvin-as-evil-Joseph-Smith abusing his power for personal gratification, and a really interesting magically-influenced slave revolt that ultimately fails. So, all in all, this book has a lot of interesting individual components, but they are not as unified into one clear message or theme like the previous four books were.

The Crystal City

This book also suffers a bit from a lack of unity, but this time instead of feeling like an accident, it feels more like the bloat that happens in the later volumes of an epic fantasy series, where the author has so many themes to touch on that they don’t have enough time to spend on any one of them. At first, I thought the theme of this book was going to be Typhoid Mary (Dead Mary in this book) and how the spread of diseases in urban areas leads to prejudice and scapegoating. Ironic, since the real Typhoid Mary actually did spread disease resulting in the deaths of many. I found these chapters fairly boring and began to wonder if the series had lost its way.

Fortunately, those opening chapters are really part of a larger theme about westward expansion and “manifest destiny.” The prejudice of city dwellers and the imperfections of urban life motivate our main characters to leave to try to establish a better place, mirroring the motivations of so many groups who left eastern America for the west. Of course, this theme is challenging to deal with since Card had magically given western America to the native Americans in Red Prophet.

But Card solves this narrative problem in two ways. First, he sends the “manifest destiny” crowd, including Calvin, down to Mexico with plans to conquer Mexico City. Here we see a return of the dangerous Aztec/Mexica civilization powered by human sacrifice that Card played with in Pastwatch. It’s a really interesting historical conjecture, though not a very politically correct one at the current time. Here again, we get a chance to see Calvin playing the version of Joseph Smith who can justify the failures of his various schemes through a twisted mental rewriting of events and motives. It’s notable that the manifest destiny of the white people fails, while the manifest destiny of the red peoples somewhat succeeds—the Mexica lose power and Tenskwa-Tawa’s unified nation of native peoples expands. This matches with early LDS perceptions of the eventual destiny of the indigenous peoples—again, see “America” in The Folk of the Fringe.

The second way that Card deals with the westward expansion is by combining two incidents of Mormon exodus into one. Alvin helps the slaves and impoverished residents of Nueva Barcelona (Louisiana) cross a river in the middle of the night, reminiscent of the Mormon flight from Nauvoo in the middle of winter across the Mississippi. However, this journey actually ends with the establishment of the Nauvoo-analog, the Crystal City, making it more like the flight from Jackson County. The racial harmony of the Crystal City is another perfecting of Mormon history, as Joseph Smith tried to welcome black Saints to Nauvoo with mixed results. It’s appropriate that Abraham Lincoln shows up for this founding of the true ideals of multicultural America on the banks of the Mississippi, though his presence felt like a big coincidence to me. I’m assuming Abraham Lincoln will have more to do in the next book, when the war that Peggy is trying to prevent finally has to occur.

Speaking of Peggy, the tension between Alvin and Peggy in this book is fascinating. It doesn’t seem to correspond to the real tension between Joseph and Emma over polygamy (though there are a few ghosts of polygamy in this book as well), but more of the tension between Joseph and God. Like God, Peggy knows where Alvin’s story is going to end and leads him along that dangerous path anyway. Alvin has to come to accept that being a Maker, and one with the purest of intentions, does not mean his work will succeed, and that he has agency even though Peggy knows the end from the beginning. This little wrestle with what it means to be a prophet with a destiny is the most interesting part of the book for me.

A Wishlist for Master Alvin

Obviously, it’s too late for me to influence the content of a book that’s coming out next week. Still, I feel compelled to stake my claim on some elements that I hope will be dealt with in Master Alvin, just for the fun of it. Tune in next month to find out how flat wrong I am about most of it.

The Civil War: Unlike in actual history, in this series the land that is the United States is made up of many different political entities. So that makes the stakes of the Civil War slightly different—no union to lose if there never was one—but it’s still clear that Alvin’s America is headed for some sort of violent crisis over the fugitive slave law, among other things. Of course, the actual-history Civil War doesn’t happen until more than a decade after Joseph is dead, so perhaps Master Alvin is too early to show what will happen with this alternate Civil War. Still, given Peggy’s close ties with the abolition movement and the introduction of Abraham Lincoln in the previous book, I would expect to see at least some hint of what will happen with this.

Polygamy and the fall of Nauvoo: Card has been very open about the fact that Alvin’s ending is Joseph’s ending. We know we’re headed to Carthage and a martyrdom. The only question is how that is going to happen along the way. The polygamy hints that have been sown throughout the series make me hope that Card is going to take one last swing at an important Mormon history question in this book. From the Fanny Alger parallel in Alvin Journeyman to Arthur detecting Mary’s feelings for Alvin in The Crystal City, there are a long line of women who find themselves attracted to Alvin in the series. In Calvin, we’ve seen a Joseph Smith willing to use his powers to woo women against their will, mirroring the worst interpretations of Nauvoo-era polygamy. The fact that Calvin is now in the Crystal City makes me think he’s going to play the role of a John C. Bennett figure. But I’m curious about how Alvin will be related to the whole mess and whether the Crystal City will fall with Alvin or whether the story will smush the Crystal City into the story of Brigham Young’s (Arthur Stewart’s) leadership and lasting community building.

Peggy and Arthur: Again, this series is so much more than a Joseph Smith retelling. Peggy is not Emma Smith, just as Arthur is not Brigham Young (though making Alvin/Joseph’s successor half-black—that’s genius-level interesting). But Peggy carries many of the elements of Emma Smith’s character with her, like being of a higher social class than Alvin and also miscarrying children. I don’t think there will be a falling out between Arthur and Peggy as there was between Emma and Brigham, but I do predict that Arthur will be the one to inherit whatever inheritance is left of the Crystal City and that Peggy will eventually leave the city to go back east—maybe to pursue her anti-slavery work and help foreshadow how the Civil War might go in this version of America.

History Reinterpreted: I’m not familiar enough with history or clever enough with plotting to guess who might show up unexpectedly in this novel. The marketing copy for Master Alvin also hints at Alvin visiting Ireland, so I’m wondering if the main focal issue of the book will be immigrants in America. We’re slightly too early for the Irish Potato Famine, but this is alternate history, so there could be some fudging of the numbers. Will there be a magical cause of the potato blight? The issue of immigration also ties nicely with LDS history in the Nauvoo period—immigrants from England were joining the church in droves.

Whatever happens in the novel, I’m fully in for the ride. I’ve gone back and forth on whether I think Orson Scott Card is the great Mormon writer, but after finally reading this series, I think there can be no doubt that is at least a great Mormon writer. The way he plays with both Mormon and American history is absolutely worth your attention, and I hope you’ll join me in reading Master Alvin when it comes out next week.