Heartfire (1998)
Heartfire is a 1998 fiction book written by Orson Scott Card.
Fifth in Orson Scott Card's Tales of Alvin Maker, set in an alternate frontier America where folk magic is plain fact and nearly everyone carries a knack. Alvin Miller, seventh son of a seventh son, is a Maker, born to shape the world with his hands and shadowed by the Unmaker that works against him. Card built the series on the bones of early American history and the life of Joseph Smith, threading hexes, dowsing, and torch-sight through a young republic of settlers, slaves, and native nations. Heartfire carries Alvin's road further as his gift draws him into that nation's deepest fault lines.
Quick answers
What is Heartfire about?
Fifth in Orson Scott Card's Tales of Alvin Maker, set in an alternate frontier America where folk magic is plain fact and nearly everyone carries a knack. Alvin Miller, seventh son of a seventh son, is a Maker, born to shape the world with his hands and shadowed by the Unmaker that works against him. Card built the series on the bones of early American history and the life of Joseph Smith, threading hexes, dowsing, and torch-sight through a young republic of settlers, slaves, and native nations. Heartfire carries Alvin's road further as his gift draws him into that nation's deepest fault lines.
When was Heartfire published?
Heartfire was published in 1998.
Who made Heartfire?
Heartfire was written by Orson Scott Card.
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A few thoughts on Heartfire
Red Dead Redemption 2 conjures the same frontier America, muddy, mythic, and morally divided, if you swap folk magic for gunmetal. American Gods runs closest on theme, old belief made literal and loose on the American land. Both suit a reader drawn to Alvin's blend of homespun magic and a nation still arguing over its own soul.
A young America built on stolen land, slavery, and buried myths
Heartfire follows Alvin through a young United States where the fight over slavery and native land is as real as his magic. Assassin's Creed III drops a player into that same revolutionary-era fracture between settlers and the people they displaced, Red Dead Redemption 2 mourns a frontier myth already curdling into violence, and Frederick Douglass's own narrative grounds that history in one man's lived account.
Old-world gods and folk magic walking modern or historical soil
Alvin's world takes folk magic as plain fact beside real settlers and real history, and these worlds make the same bet. American Gods drops old deities into a skeptical modern America and dares you to take them literally, Vikings and The Last Kingdom treat prophecy and old gods as forces real kings must reckon with, and God of War puts Kratos inside a Norse world where the myths are simply how things are.