Everfair

What's the title?

Everfair

Who wrote it?

Nisi Shawl

When was it written?

2016

What star rating would you give it?

2/5

Would I recommend it?

Nope. Despite having an incredible premise, some beautiful writing and interesting characters, this book fell flat for me. It was a push to force myself to finish reading it. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone picking it up or enjoying it, but I can’t see a scenario in which I would say to anyone “THIS is the book you are looking for!”.

What's it about? (non-spoilers)

In this steampunk alternate history, a motley group of African American Christians, White European Atheists, and Royal African Natives band together to halt the atrocities committed by Leopold II’s Belgium. The novel follows our diverse cast of characters through the founding of the utopian state of Everfair, its wars, its politics, and its evolution.

What did you think? (spoilers)

The premise of this novel immediately caught my attention. Leopold’s Congo is one of the great blights of colonial history, and having the opportunity for an African-American author to go back in time and right those wrongs, if only fictionally, got me super excited. Unfortunately, the novel didn’t deliver, for me anyway.

That isn’t to say there isn’t a lot of awesome in this novel. Like I said, the premise is fantastic. The characters are diverse in gender, in ethnicity, in religion, and in just about every other way imaginable. Everfair’s characters are all complicated, flawed, and empathetic – aka, the best kind of characters.

The prose was often lyrical. Shawl would describe her world in the kind of metaphors and images that would literally make me pause just to savor their beauty. For instance, when discussing the consequences of one character’s death on her mother, Shawl writes “Lily’s death was all that prevented the green shoots of her attachment to Tink from growing to the point of bearing fruit” (p220). That’s a freaking beautiful way to describe the way love precedes babies. Shawl’s writing is littered with such gems.

I also appreciated the political complexity at play in Everfair. I once heard it said that every utopia is, by necessity, at least partly also a dystopia. Sure, the idea of diverse groups coming together to form an inclusive state sounds all well and good. The problem is that diverse group includes racist people, sexist people, petty people, duplicitous people, hypocritical people, and well-meaning but ultimately naïve and arrogant colonists. The hubris and foibles of everyone involved in Everfair are well on display, and it’s great.

Perhaps my favorite thing about Everfair was its steampunk element. Be it the dirigibles or brass prosthetics or the myriad of other inventions that occur within Everfair’s borders, the descriptions of each device, even those as mundane as a bicycle, crackle with potential. Being introduced to rubber and brass is like being introduced to a new character – endless possibilities.

So with all this going for Everfair, how did it manage to be such a disappointing read? Well in part because Everfair frequently reads like a history account as opposed to a story. This kept me at a distance from the narrative. Each chapter jumped across locations, character perspective, and months if not years. The jumps in the events of the character’s lives sometimes followed an inevitable logic, but frequently they left me wondering what on earth happened that caused the circumstances and personalities to change so drastically, causing me to feel disoriented.

As much detail as Shawl provides her mechanical creations, she doesn’t extend nearly enough to the culture within Everfair. I found myself wondering what the population demographics of Everfair was, which cities were its hubs of culture, which cities held political influence, what activities or sports did the people of Everfair enjoy? There wasn’t enough world-building for me.

I didn’t appreciate the introduction of fantastical elements in the second half. For nearly the entirety of the first half of the novel, the story was firmly situated in the realm of science fiction. Suddenly there are African deities bestowing characters with dream fire abilities and characters able to possess and manipulate the bodies of certain animals. I like fantasy, I like fantasy a lot, but to suddenly change the rules and logic of the world created in the novel feels like a breach of contract between the novel and the reader.

Shawl’s preoccupation with the romantic relationships in her books did not work for me. A well-done romance I think can add to any story – but the romances in Everfair were not well done. They frequently felt too much like rom-coms, with frequent and inexplicable decisions and circumstances keeping the pairs apart so they could come together for a “happy ending”.

Shawl, unsurprisingly, thinks writers are crucial to the state and has Everfair’s government hold a position of Poet, but she never feels the need to explain the importance of this position or what exactly the role entails. I could make assumptions as to the answers to those questions, but the fact that she didn’t describe them grated. Also, for a novel where a good third of the main characters are lauded as excellent spies, the spy craft in this novel is barely shown. I can think of really only one scene where spying was shown in action. Most of the spy craft in the novel is the reader being told how great of a spy Lisette or Josina is.

I was excited for Everfair and am sad I didn’t enjoy it as much as I had hoped I would. However, this novel has renewed my interest in steampunk as a genre, so for that at least I can be grateful.

Images: goodreads

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