The Crystal City (2003)
The Crystal City is a 2003 fiction / fantasy / historical book written by Orson Scott Card.
Alvin Maker has spent his life learning what his hands can do. On an American frontier where folk-magic works, where dowsers find water and a torch can read the lines of a person's future, Alvin is the seventh son of a seventh son, a Maker who understands how things hold together and how to mend them. His wife Peggy has glimpsed a terrible war waiting down the country's life-lines. The sixth Tales of Alvin Maker gathers hexes, knacks, and river towns as Alvin gathers people, trying to build something that might stand against what is coming.
Quick answers
What is The Crystal City about?
Alvin Maker has spent his life learning what his hands can do. On an American frontier where folk-magic works, where dowsers find water and a torch can read the lines of a person's future, Alvin is the seventh son of a seventh son, a Maker who understands how things hold together and how to mend them. His wife Peggy has glimpsed a terrible war waiting down the country's life-lines. The sixth Tales of Alvin Maker gathers hexes, knacks, and river towns as Alvin gathers people, trying to build something that might stand against what is coming.
When was The Crystal City published?
The Crystal City was published in 2003.
Who made The Crystal City?
The Crystal City was written by Orson Scott Card.
Similar books
Explore The Crystal City guides
A few thoughts on The Crystal City
Readers drawn to Alvin's homespun sorcery will find a kindred world in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, where folklore, potions, and old magic soak the countryside. For alternate-history Americana with a strange power humming underneath, Red Dead Redemption 2 walks the same dust, and American Gods carries the same idea that the land itself is charged with belief.
American folklore where an ordinary place turns out to be sacred ground
The Crystal City finds Alvin trying to build a sanctuary out of hexes, dowsing, and river towns while Peggy foresees the war bearing down on all of it. American Gods and Bioshock Infinite hide that same old magic and providence inside a country that insists it left superstition behind, and Smallville and Wizard and Glass follow a marked outsider whose gift keeps drawing danger toward the people who love him.