It is the late 1800s. The American Civil War is over, but
racial injustice still runs rampant, and King Leopold is blazing a swath of
destruction through the Congo. African-American missionaries combine forces
with the Fabian Society, made up of utopians and socialists from Great Britain,
to set up a refuge for escapees from the Congo, as well as people of African
descent from all over the globe. Using steampunk technology and spiritual
guidance, they struggle to hold their own against the depredations of Belgian
mercenaries and build Everfair, a land where all can live in harmony.
I picked up this book hoping for a decolonialist narrative
with an emphasis on environmental harmony (for, of course, much of the history
of colonization in Africa is about stripping the land of its natural
resources). This expectation was certainly influenced by the recent film Black Panther. Unfortunately, that is
not really what I got. Most of the founders of Everfair are white, only one POV
character is native African, and the new colonists are nearly as bad as the old
ones – it’s seen as a big step forward when they invent the internal combustion
engine. Additionally, Shawl opts to tell a twenty-five-year history of the
country, concentrating neither on a character-driven story nor a plot-driven
one, but on an overly broad picture communicated in too-short vignettes,
reminiscent of the worst aspects of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. I honestly think I would’ve liked Everfair much more if it had been a
ten-book series, where each book could really do these characters justice. As
it is, the pacing feels simultaneously rushed and drawn out.
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