REVIEW: Everybody’s Perfect by Jo Walton
Piranesi meets Swordspoint in an elegant relay race through fantasy Venice from Hugo award-winning author Jo Walton
The Serenissima is built from mist and belief, a mythical shadow sister to Venice and crossroads of the nine worlds.
When a laborer called Tiry has a dream that Serenissima will have a doge, and that they will marry the sea, he tells it to a fortune teller named Khadsha. She tells her apprentice, a gondolier called Taddeo, who tells a cop named Gom, who’s heard it from five people this morning already. And by that point, it’s already settled into the bones of the Serenissima, more than half-fated.
Everybody’s Perfect is a gentle, shifting, structurally inventive narrative of startling beauty that will make you rethink everything you think you know about fantasy.
Review
Not every book is for everybody.
I’m trying to get past my love of a beautiful cover and the belief that if I love the cover it follows that I’ll love the book. But I couldn’t resist this one and the blurb sounded intriguing enough that I thought, “Why not?” Well, maybe it gets better but from almost the start, I quickly realized this is not for me.
The first chapter is like running into a brick wall of telling. Literally stream of consciousness info-dumping that goes on for pages with almost no breaks. I don’t know who or what these characters are but I’m being told in exhausting detail about familial naming patterns of a certain group and about some kind of blight that the narrator is suffering from. Honestly when my eyes started crossing, I decided nope, nope, nope. Readers who enjoy meandering stories and lots of descriptions might take a look at it but sadly the cover is all that worked for me. DNF
~Jayne
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