A fantastic love letter to the city of Venice, set in a world very much inspired by it, but just next door.
The dream of La Serenissima. A city of canals, of masks, the most Serene Republic. Unique even among the diverse and unique city states of Pre-Modern History. A crossroads city. A dreamlike city. A place of wonder.
In Everybody’s Perfect, Jo Walton gives us a literally dream-like version of Venice,
The novel is structured a little differently than most modern novels, genre or otherwise, and in the afterword, Walton explains that her model for the novel is Marguerite Yourcenar’s A Coin in Nine Hands and she herself has used this pattern before in short stories.
We meet a variety of characters in her setting, of which I will speak in detail shortly. I want to focus on characters and structure first, since it is essential for you the reader to decide if you want to tackle this book. We get a series of characters who are connected in a chain and are not repeated as points of view. Each character is given what we in the Secret Amber Cabal would recognize as a “trump description”: A set of iconic phrases and a described portrait of the character.
As an example, let me give you the first, Tiry:
Aspect: Strength. Time of Day: Afternoon. Muse: Thalia. Liberal Art: Rhetoric. Animal: Lion. Sphere: Moon. Social Class: Artisan. Virtue: Fortitude. Species: Bauta. Description: A man with a face that is blank except for eyes and a jutting chin is lifting a house from where it has fallen on a lion. The lion is grinning.
We get these for all the subsequent characters as well and these give us an immediate iconic and archetype for each of them. The pattern of the novel has a character in their chapter, in a first person point of view, go about their day, interact with the city and its people, and eventually meet the next point of view character. Tiry hands off to Khadasha who hands off to Pell who hands off to Taddeo and on and on. As the novel goes on, we get fewer “brand new” characters and start hitting characters who have shown up in the narrative, but have not had a point of view. But in this way we get a braided story over a nebulous but seemingly short period of time in La Serenissima, getting to know these characters, and of course, the nature of La Serenissima itself. The characters are from a variety of species, backgrounds, and histories and give us a portrait of the city itself just from what they see.
And what a city we are given a view of. La Serenissima is not our Venice, but rather lies in a dimension (the actual word here is hypostase), that is different than our material plane. There are nine hypostases, ranging from the unreachable God in the first all the way to Primal Chaos at the bottom in the ninth¹ . The material world of our own is the seventh hypostase. La Serenissima is in the eighth, and that gives it an amorphous dreamlike quality to the city. This is a city built on and running on dreams, and if you leave your gondola unattended and unwatched for too long, it will fade away into nothingness. Things can come up and out of that formlessness as well. Given that amorphousness, La Serenissima can and does act as a connection point, a hub between worlds. Species of various kinds can get to other worlds quickly by transferring through La Serenissima² . Various species including humans (called Venetians here³ ) make their way and live in this dreamlike city where time flows a little weird, there are no days per se, and the strivings of the populace slowly breathe an idea into being.
So there is a lazy, dreamlike feel to La Serenissima, it has the canals and lagoon and other accoutrements of Venice. The novel is awfully vague for a long time “when it is on Earth” and I found myself wondering that. In the course of the characters, we finally hit upon a Venetian, and find out how and why they are there, and when they left Venice of our world. So there is a definite feel of how the city feels and acts being different not only because of the dream like aspect of this dimension, but also what the characters bring from where they are from to their perception of the place.
So in addition to seeing the city through these diverse characters as being the backbone of the novel, there are a couple of plotlines going on here, inspired by magic and foretelling. There is a plague afoot, but there is a prophecy that the cure for the Blight will be found. And then there is the idea, inspired by the real Venice, that a Doge will appear and will “marry the sea”. The story of the book is from the mystical genesis of this idea, through to its culmination⁴. Along the way, we get stories of romance, and loss, and heartbreak, and searching, and coming together. The linked stories together form our tapestry and our narrative.
So if you are looking for a traditional secondary world fantasy narrative, Everybody’s Perfect is probably not quite the right fit for you. This is a book to immerse yourself in a series of characters, whose portraits, struggles and lives together tell a small but important story of changes coming to La Serenissima... and to the characters that we meet. It’s a small fantasy, a gentle fantasy. If I had to pull out a theme of the book, it might be that to have a better world, and a better life, we have to be able to imagine it can and will be so. We have to be able to dream it into existence before we can build it into existence. In the La Serenissima, dreaming it into existence is more than half the battle. On Earth, for us Venetians, it's a lot more work than that but without being able to imagine a better world, we have no capacity to make that better world possible. Everybody’s Perfect shows the power of that belief.
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Highlights:
- Dream like world based on the fantasy of Venice
- A braided novel, following a variety of characters through their time in La Serenissima
- Immersive, gentle, enthusiastic fantasy.
Reference: Walton, Jo, Everybody’s Perfect, (Tor Books, 2026)
¹ Listening recently to a podcast on the novel Piranesi, it occurs to me that the world of Piranesi could easily be slotted into one of the higher hypostases, as being closer to the godhead because of being a realm of platonic forms.
² Ada Palmer has described the real life medieval Venice as the airport hub of the Mediterranean and Walton seems to have decided to run with that ball all the way to the goal line, here. La Serenissima may not be the one true world of which all others are but shadows, quite to the contrary, but it is the one true hub that every location can connect to. And one close to Primal Chaos at that. If I were still running new Amber games, I’d steal this in a second. I may yet steal it for other TTRPGs I am running. Another RPG that comes to mind in thinking on this novel is the system Everway, which relies on artistic cards for resolution mechanics.
³ It’s similar to how in post-Roman Europe such Europeans, regardless of their origin, were called Franks by those outside of Europe. Anyone from Earth is called Venetians, because that’s the only point on Earth that connects to La Serenissima.
⁴I am reminded of the latter books of the Just City trilogy by Walton, where the gods themselves are caught up in the webs of fate.
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
