Everfair

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.

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.