Everybody's Perfect by Jo Walton Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, historical fantasy, historical fiction, science fantasy
Pages: 272
Published by Tor Books on June 30, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
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.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
My Review:
The story emerges from the very same mists that enshroud its setting, the Serenissima. At first, it seems like a magical place, and it is. It’s fantasy Venice, not Venice during Carnivale, but Venice as if Carnivale were real life.
Which, in its own way, it is, just not quite like this.
The story itself begins with a dream. A day laborer who dreams that the Serenissima will have its very own doge, just as the real Venice does. But the Serenissima is a place where dreams have power. So do wishes. So does WILL. If enough people believe a thing, there is enough magic in the Serenissima to make that dream, or wish, or intention, come true.
Which turns Everybody’s Perfect into a story within a story, as it tells the tale of the day when Tiry’s dream of the Serenissima’s doge turns into history and fact, as told by one member of every class and race from the nine worlds who became caught up in the history that was to come.
Told decades in its aftermath in a place where time refuses to be measured consistently – or sometimes at all.
So this is the story of a magical Venice, set in a magical mist, suffused with the magic of the nine worlds but tied, just as magically, to the real Venice of this world, for good and ill and everything in between.
It’s also the story of a place and a country that recognizes that “everybody’s perfect”, because they are all aware that there is beauty to be had in imperfection, even if they were all conditioned, back in their own real places of origin, to believe the exact opposite.
Which is just the merest bejeweled sliver of the magic of The Serenissima.
Escape Rating B: In the end, this is utterly delightful, but it takes a while for it to get there. There’s a LOT of mist involved. I spent a lot of time and pages trying to figure out where it was going and how it was going to get there as the whole thing gets revealed very slowly and carefully.
Then there’s a ‘AHA’ moment about 2/3rds of the way through and the whole thing starts coming together.
Which makes the whole thing feel more like a vehicle for things the author wanted to say, and a bit of experimental writing to work her way out of a writing slump (she admits that second part in her afterword). It doesn’t completely gel into a story until near the end, and it makes you rethink everything you’ve read up to that point.
That doesn’t mean it’s not fun, or that it’s not interesting, or that it doesn’t have a lot of interesting things to say, just that it takes a while to figure out how those things work together and into a whole.
One of the things that’s neat and cool and either immersive or distancing depends on how much one knows about the Carnivale of Venice and the meaning behind its iconic masks. Many stories that deal with worlds other than our own, both epic fantasy and science fiction – and the author writes both – is that both include other races as well as humans. In this magical, mythical, fictional Venice, the other races embody the appearance of and meanings behind the traditional Carnivale masks and it helps to go look that stuff up. A LOT.
This is also a story that sits on the border between fantasy and SF, and the reader needs to decide to ‘just go with it’ for it to work. If your brain gets invested in trying to decide, the reading experience is basically toast. It’s not that the Serenissima isn’t linked to the real Venice, and it’s not that the linkage doesn’t create real problems for Venice, but that that’s not what the story is about.
Rather, it’s a ‘day in the life’ of a group of very disparate beings, all observing or participating or bringing about an important crossroads in the life of their world at the behest or encouragement of the magic in it. And it is a story about found family and finding perfection in imperfection.
Those parts of the story, and the way they come together, are absolutely lovely, no matter how much mist obscures the way.
This will help me read the book when I get it. Thanks!