Seventh Son
- 224
- Pages
- about 4 h
- Reading time
- Mythopoeic Awards
- Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel
- Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire for Best Foreign Novel
- Mythopoeic Fantasy Award
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Our view
“Seventh Son” is alternate-history fantasy from a natural storyteller, set in a world where ordinary people have magical knacks. Some readers praise the way Card holds their attention and how cleverly he reworks the past. Others find the strongly religious setting hard to relate to, or warn that the book stops without a proper ending. It is the first of “The Tales of Alvin Maker”.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Seventh Son (1987) is an alternate history/fantasy novel by American writer Orson Scott Card. It is the first book in Card's The Tales of Alvin Maker series and is about Alvin Miller, the seventh son of a seventh son. Seventh Son won a Locus Award and was nominated for both the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards in 1988. Seventh sons have strong "knacks", and seventh sons of seventh sons are both extraordinarily rare and powerful. In fact, young Alvin appears to be the only one in the world. His abilities make him the target of the Unmaker, who recognizes Alvin's powers as those of a Maker, only the second ever, and it had been a long time since the first had walked on water and turned water to wine. The Unmaker works largely by water and tries to kill Alvin in his early years before he can master his abilities.
Reading order · The Tales of Alvin Maker
Full order & progress →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.2 across 134 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 48% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Fantasy average of 8.0. That is how 7.6 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardcover | 7.2 | 134 | 100% |
Frequently asked
How long is Seventh Son?
It has 224 pages — shorter than 98% of the ranked books in Fantasy.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Fantasy — and a score of 7.6, the closest to this book.
