Everfair

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.