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3.0 

Everfair

By Nisi Shawl
Everfair by Nisi Shawl digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

From acclaimed short fiction writer Nisi Shawl comes a brilliant alternate history set in the Congo, where heroes strive for a Utopia and endeavor to live together despite their differences.

Now with a foreward from award-winning author Cadwell Turnbull.

In this re-imagining of Belgium's disastrous colonization of the Congo, African American missionaries join forces with British socialists to purchase land from the Congo Free State's "owner," King Leopold II. This land, which they name Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven for native populations of the Congo as well as settlers from around the world, including dream-eyed Europeans attempting to create a better society, formerly enslaved people returning from America, and Chinese railroad builders escaping hard labor. Using the combined knowledge of four continents, Everfair becomes a land of spying cats and gulls, nuclear dirigibles buoyed by barkcloth balloons, and silent pistols that shoot poison knives.

With this technology, Everfair will attempt to defeat the Belgian tyrant Leopold II. But even if they can defeat their great enemy, a looming world war and political infighting may threaten to destroy everything they have built.

“A book with gorgeous sweep, spanning years and continents, loves and hates, histories and fantasies… Everfair is sometimes sad, often luminous, and always original. A wonderful achievement.” — Karen Joy Fowler

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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97 Reviews

3.0
“This was a very frustrating experience for me. I was expecting to love it and I'm sad I did not. Quite the contrary. Nisi Shawl chooses an extremely wide scope for this story of not even 400 pages. And I felt scattered everywhere, unmoored, unable to tether myself to any sort of character or storyline, even though the potential was incredibly high! Which, considering that two of the bisexual women POV characters start out the story as lovers even though they live in a sort of free love arrangement with the husband of one of them?! That's like catnip for me, and yet... I honestly would have preferred this to be either 800 pages or a duology, with each of the two parts as a separate, chonky book. I think writing about the decentralized forming of a nation absolutely *demands* plurality in voices and POV characters (which exists here), but there is such plurality that everyone and every plot or conflict becomes lost in the weeds. But also, it's decentralized and a monarchy?! There are way too many POV characters and also the time axis is super long - this takes place over 30 years -, which means that so many interesting things either happen off-page (one of the main POV characters we follow in the beginning dies off-page even), don't have time to be developed or are introduced very late in the game. I was baffled by some of the choices. Some of the chapters could have been just summarized in a sentence and it would not have made a dent in the overall story, and some of the characters were very one-note: Martha, for instance, is so obsessed with how not everyone in Everfair is Christian and that seems to be her only character trait, other than her occupation as a medical professional. A lot of the chapters don't even take place in Everfair anyway. And yet, with such large scope, I have no idea what the people are fighting for - what day-to-day life is like in Everfair, for normal people and important characters alike, what exactly they're fighting for, what are the values? There is no sitting put here, to just feel how a normal day passes, we can't sit with the characters and their quite interesting conflicts about identity, racism, religion, love, acceptance. And it's sad, because of that potential and because the prose is quite beautiful in many places. I just wish it had had time to breathe.”

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