Tor reached out with this one and I couldn’t help myself but jump on it because Jo Walton… but also honestly this fantastic cover!
So thanks to the author as well as Tor via NetGalley for the review copy!
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.
Everybody’s Perfect is the story of The Serenissima, which is… more or less Fantasy-Venice. It is actually adjacent to Venice, as well as eight other worlds, and is like a mythical misty crossroads between them. Eight different races of people, including humans, have come to live in the Serenissima, which is as outside of time as it is outside of space. Humans from modern times could travel in and then travel out and find themselves in medieval Venice, or vice-versa. It’s quite an interesting place. Humans are known as Venetians (as they all come from Venice), and there are races of people there who have faces with permanent domino masks inset in them, people who are human/creature hybrids with the heads of cats, birds, or dogs, or a mythical ninth race that nobody has seen before.
A man called Tiry has a dream one day that the Serenissima will one day have a doge, and that they will marry the sea, which is something nobody has ever thought would or could ever happen. He tells his neighbor Khadsha, who tells her apprentice, who tells a policeman, who tells someone else who heard it from someone else already, and this little rumor flies around the city from one person to another. There is a plague going around the Serenissima, and all these people are somewhat involved with it as well, and with this rumor of there being a doge comes another rumor, that there is a prophecy that the plague will be cured! This is the very interestingly told story of these events.
Everybody’s Perfect is told in an interesting way, in that it starts from the point of view of Tiry, a laborer, who tells about having the dream, and telling it to his neighbor, a prophet named Khadsha. The next chapter is from Khadsha’s point of view as she tells the story of how she fled her world into the Serenissima as being a prophet was not something that her people were okay with, and along the way she tells her apprentice, a cat-headed person named Taddeo about the dream that Tiry told her about, who carries on his day in the next chapter and so on and so forth.
The story is told in this… sort of cascade of narratives until it is concluded, and while it took me a little bit to get into the idea of it, was a really interesting way of structuring it, and made it all the more interesting. It isn’t a very high stakes story, but it was interesting enough that I read it in one sitting. It was cozy, in its own way. A very interesting story with a structure unlike anything I’d ever really read before. So, that was a nice bonus!
I’d recommend Everybody’s Perfect to anyone who would like to read a unique story that has the aura of Venice about it, but is still pretty fantastical. 4/5 stars!~
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