...a beautifully written and thrillingly ambitious alternate history ... It’s a tribute to Shawl’s powerful writing that her intricate, politically and racially charged imaginary world seems as believable — sometimes more believable — than the one we inhabit.
Everfair is an incredibly ambitious, fascinating novel. Words like 'complex' and 'multifaceted' are appropriate; sprawling and dense ... It’s a gorgeous, complex, thinky novel, engaged with meaty themes. But it requires patience and a little effort on the reader’s part, and it offers no easy conclusion. I suspect it won’t quite be to everyone‘s taste.
The cast of characters is beautifully diverse in terms of faith, ability, ethnicities, sexual orientation and nationalities, making the web of relationships intricate and fraught; Shawl is brilliant at showing where the various ideals, motivations and desires for Everfair as a utopian experiment bump up against each other ... That said I wish the story had been split up over more volumes, to allow these fascinating people room to breathe and interact with each other in more sustained ways...towards the middle and end, Everfair feels like one long, slow pan across space and time, insufficiently anchored in characters whose interactions resemble a sequence of vignettes set against the backdrop of Shawl's carefully designed world.
Everfair is a big, complex and engrossing saga, broad in ambition and deep in accomplishment ... Although it possesses elements of the fantastic, Everfair remains grounded in historical and psychological realism, making it a welcoming entry point for readers unfamiliar with steampunk ... ultimately a hopeful book, an exciting and original take on a too-little-known period of history.
Shawl’s refusal to gloss over history’s ugliness, and the palpable depth of research that bolsters her depictions, creates a sort of moral and aesthetic void. The reader is left willing, even eager, to accept the escape that Shawl offers: an imaginative alternate history, in which a coalition of Western socialists, Asian inventors and indigenous people fighting the Belgians form a new nation called Everfair ... It’s soaring, high-minded stuff, and Shawl does a marvelous job of demonstrating the capabilities of the steampunk subgenre ... Yet the story suffers from too many jumps in time, overly quick transitions of scene and mood, and the inclusion of too many characters.
Shawl has trimmed an epic that could span multiple volumes into less than 400 pages. And that economy comes at a price: aside from the ostensible protagonist, a woman named Lisette Toutournier who is loosely based on the French novelist Colette, many of the other characters lack complexity ... the depth of care and consideration that she has put into this world cannot be overpraised. Too, the amount of life in this book is overwhelming.
Shawl invites readers to explore the challenges of world-building, both in the speculative sense of creating an alternate history and in the political sense of organizing a diverse and functioning society ... Readers who enjoy greater diversity in fantasy and science fiction stories will stand up and cheer for this core vision of rarely seen marginalized people in alliance ... Everfair fulfills the promise of utopian SF, especially 20th-century genealogies of socialist-anarchistic and feminist-LGBT storytelling ... She proves herself a master of characters’ interior voices, deftly shifting points of view.
