bibliovermis 's review for:

Everfair by Nisi Shawl

4.0

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This book had a really interesting structure. Some combination of factors—the tense it is written in, the fact that jumps of sometimes ten years occur between short chapters, a general forward-looking perspective—makes each chapter feel like a prologue. That, and that fact that a date of death is provided for each character in the dramatis personae at the beginning, have the ultimate effect of really driving home the "history" part of this alternate history. It feels like a story in a history book explaining how things got the way they are—like the real story will begin once this book is over—but the story told in its pages is very different from that which actually occurred. The depiction of a drastically altered past in this manner left me thinking, as I think was intended, about the possibility that a few individuals and their actions can have markedly powerful effects on the present, forever altering what is possible for those in the future, for better or for worse.