Everfair

DNF - PG 25

Why?

I love the idea of the book, I was even prepared for the book being more like a series of vignettes than an actual novel. What I wasn't prepared for was the writing style. I've always thought that writing style should be almost invisible, kind of like the studs in a house: obviously there by the house being able to stand, but unseen because of the walls and other furnishing. The fact is, the writing style in this book is one that left me constantly mentally editing the writing and that simple fact was what made this book pretty much impossible for me to continue. (I've done this before with writing styles that are just too jarring.) I do deeply love the idea, but it just wasn't for me.

I really wanted to like this book because the concept is so cool: a steampunk story where African characters drive King Leopold out of the Congo. Unfortunately, that's not really what this book was. There were so many characters but hardly any of them were African, and the disjointed way the story was told with so many POV characters in little vignettes over several decades (Leopold is gone around the 50% mark and the rest is kind of bland politicking around WWI) that it was hard to really care what happened to any individual character. The conflict about the characters who helped drive Leopold out living on illegally purchased land is interesting but barely addressed. There are so many huge age gap romances for no reason, which is a pain because there is way too much focus on the romances considering how little time each character has to make an impression.

reviews.metaphorosis.com

Everfair is told from a slew of different viewpoints – American, French, Macauian, and, of course, Central African. The characters are relatively distinct, and have very different viewpoints. What they are not, unfortunately, is interesting. While we do learn about their histories and desires, I found very little reason to care what happened to them. In part, that's because Shawl constantly skips from place to place, frequently eliding key events, and leaving us to pick up the pieces. As a technique, it can be effective, but in this book, with so many characters and places and happenings, I found it more confusing than subtle. It's complicated by the fact that there's a fair amount of trading of romantic partners, and what might be notable characteristics – e.g., prosthetic clockwork hands – are shared by many key figures. The result was less a fine weave of different threads than a tangle of raw cotton tangled in awkward knots. I found the politics of it all even less interesting, and it's a book that's very much about personal politics.

The world is a definite alternate – not only is the history different, but the technology leans toward steampunk, and at least some magic is real. Because I've spent a fair amount of time in that part of the world (and in Liberia, the closest thematic cognate), I'd hoped the geography would at least draw my attention. But while names are only slightly altered (e.g. to our historical versions), the landscape is only vaguely drawn in, and it's difficult to separate one locale from another.

I found the result distinctly unsatisfying. Shawl's prose style is nice, but the overall book was both too dry and too jumbled to hold my interest.

I've long been a fan of steampunk, but it's always made me a little uncomfortable that a lot of the genre glosses over a lot of the actual history of the Victorian/Edwardian periods in favour of using the time period as window dressing. I appreciated Everfair because Shawl refuses to do that in this story of Fabians and American religious missionaries founding a new society in the Belgian Congo during the reign of King Leopold. Additionally, there's a lot of interesting, thought-provoking material on how socities come together and define themselves, and the perils they face in the light of doing so.

Wow, this book was ambitious. I have to give it so much credit just for the number of diverse issues and places and cultures it represented. It's difficult for me to rate, because while I didn't always enjoy it, and sometimes found my interest slipping in a particular scene, overall I think this book did some inspired, unique things, and tackled some very underrepresented topics in a fascinating way. The first half was wonderfully engaging; the politics of the second half lost me a little bit and I found the plot and characters less exciting. I do wish the book as a whole had more focus. While I did appreciate the many different character perspectives, I found some of them tedious and redundant–a few could have been fairly easily omitted or consolidated. I did love that Lisette and Daisy's relationship was sort of the tether binding the book together, helping to balance all the transitions of time and place the book went through. And the shifts in their relationship was a perfectly constructed mirror for the shifts that took place in Everfair: a combination of love and sacrifice, betrayal and insult, consolidation and peace. Overall I think this is an important book for its brazen stance on colonialism, race relations, and what it means to fight for a home that has been stolen.