Aaron's Reviews > Red Prophet

It's a shame that there are so few good alternate history books that I have been able to find. This one, Red Prophet is a prime example. The second part in the popular Alvin Maker series, it explores an alternate early 19th century America in which Oliver Cromwell's Puritanical revolution succeeded in the long run and frontier folk magic works.
So far, so good. I really enjoy the historical details that went into this work, the stories that get slipped in about Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, etc. And in Red Prophet, we get to meet and see from the viewpoints of a large cast of historical characters: Lafayette, Napoleon, Tecumseh, his brother the Prophet, William Henry Harrison, Andrew Jackson, and Mike Fink all turn up.
This really should have been a good book. Unfortunately, it is a case study in how NOT to write about Native Americans. In this world Native Americans: have a connection to the earth that white people don't have, giving them almost magical powers of stealth, evasion, and tracking; cannot adopt any "white" customs (wearing their clothes, using their rifles, drinking their "likker", learning to read... farming...) without losing this connection; don't hunt, they just ask animals if it's a good time to die, and the animals that say "yes" get eaten; only seem to come up with names that require hyphens, z's, or k's (Ta-Kumsaw, Cre-Ek, Chok-Taw, Cherriky, Mizzipy, Mizogan, Tippy-Canoe); and can't share the land with white people without becoming "white" in the process, because white people kill the spirit of the land, just by being dumb white people who chop down trees and kill animals and quarry stones and build churches and roads and houses and bridges and...
Anything interesting about the story is overshadowed by this painful over-romanticization of the First Peoples. And really, there's little that is interesting, since about five years of alternate American history are squeezed into only about 300 pages.