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Now, just because it's not like any other Jo Walton novel, that doesn't mean that it's not recognizably in a lineage of Walton's work, especially Walton's recent novels, which reflect an amazingly fruitful deep friendship and artistic relationship with the brilliant novelist and historian Ada Palmer:
Walton's work has always been incredible. I mean, every new Jo Walton novel is my favorite Jo Walton novel…until the next Jo Walton novel comes along and blows it out of the water. Her "small change" trilogy, a series of locked-door mystery novels set in a Britain that capitulated to the Nazis, is even more prescient today than it felt 20 years ago:
And My Real Children haunts me to this day. I read it all in one sitting, in a hotel room, stricken by jetlag and hooked deep into Walton's narrative about the two paths her protagonist's life took in forking universes that I stayed up all night, and by the morning, I had cried my way through all the kleenex, toilet paper and towels in the room:
But then came Walton's Palmer years, and everything got even better. There was the Philosopher Kings trilogy, an incredibly funny, incredibly ambitious tale in which every person who ever dreamed of living in Plato's Republic is brought to an island (along with Apollo, Athena and Socrates) to try the experiment, raising a cohort of orphans bought from the slave markets of antiquity to be philosopher kings:
And then there was Lent, an incredibly nuanced and sympathetic fantasy novel about Savonarola, the mad preacher and cult leader whose Bonfire of the Vanities and feuds with the Pope overshadow his legacy, which Walton recovers admirably as fodder for a novel that turns out to be as action-packed as any spy thriller:
And now it's Everybody's Perfect, a book that pretty much defines what it means for one text to be "in dialog" with another text. In this case, it's Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, a stunning magnum opus that tells not just the story of the Renaissance, but the story of the story, all the different ways the Renaissance has been used, abused, revised and recovered, starting with the Renaissance itself. It's a book that will make you rethink everything you know about European history, about the world today, and about the very idea of history itself:
The back half of Palmer's Renaissance is a recursive retelling of the same events, from the points of view of 15 different historical personages, from the famous (Michelangelo) to the infamous (Lucretia Borgia). It's a kind of feltschrift, circling and recircling these moments, revealing their depth and contradictions.
Structurally, Everybody's Perfect feels very much like that final section of Inventing the Renaissance. Each chapter introduces a new point-of-view character, who reflects on a single, extraordinary series of events in an even more extraordinary city, the Serenissima, a phantom Venice that sits at the intersection of many parallel worlds with many parallel versions of humanity.
The sun never shines in the Serenissima; it is forever shrouded in mist. If enough of its denizens believe that something is true, it becomes true, and so islands and buildings and even gods are summoned up by the power of belief. The corollary of this is that anything that falls out of the city's regard might just melt into mist. When you tie up your gondola, you'd best pay an urchin to watch it – not just to keep it from being stolen, but to keep it from evaporating altogether. When two people meet in the Serenissima, they greet each other by reciting, "I see you." If you aren't seen, you might just disappear.
Eight different versions of humanity from eight different worlds mix in the Serenissima. They come from all times, and sometimes they go to all times as well. There's the Venetians, who come from our world, and who have kept the secret of the Serenissima for centuries, even as they've used it as a source of wealth and military advantage. But there are also races with the heads of dogs and cats and birds, a race whose faces are all inset with domino masks, and even stranger races still. There's even a rumored ninth race, who may or may not exist, and whose traits are not known to anyone, though surely they are fearsome (if they're real) (and if the people of Serenissima believe in them, mightn't they become real?).
The novel opens with a vision: the Serenissima will receive a doge. A low-born, weak and humble resident, a blind and partially paralyzed pauper who fell victim to a plague will marry the sea, and bring peace to the warring factions of the Serenissima. This prophecy is the prime mover for the eight tales that follow, as we move through the lives and geographies of one representative of each of the races of the Serenissima.
Walton conjures up the dream logic magic of Among Others, where the feeling that something might be magic can never be fully believed – or discounted. She revives the endlessly fascinating philosophical speculation of The Philosopher Kings. She invokes the tender love, sacrifice, and bitter heartbreak of My Real Children. And she invokes Palmer's Renaissance, endlessly reinvented by everyone who falls in love with it, and everyone who rejects it, for their own parochial reasons, and even the ones who are very wrong might just be a little right.
It's a remarkable novel. It's a gift, really. It's so complicated and yet so captivating, so wise and yet so simple. It won't make you feel like you've fallen into a dream – it will make you feel like everything you've lived up until now was the dream, and you have finally awoken.
January Book Reviews: Everybody's Perfect by Jo Walton
I received a free copy from Tor Books via Netgalley in exchange for a free review. Release date June 30th, 2026.
I've read almost all of Jo Walton's books, so I was very excited to get an advance copy of her latest. In Everybody's Perfect, a series of linked vignettes follow the lives of people in the Serenissima, a strange misty Venice between worlds. Fortunes are won and lost, hearts are broken, and a new Doge slowly rises out of rumors.
Everybody's Perfect has nine point of view characters, each with their own section. All of the characters are loosely entwined, and every new section jumps to a new character introduced in the previous vignette. Each character is a different species from another world linked to the Serenissima, and all of them have the faces of Venetian masks: harlequin, dogheaded, garlanded by flowers, etc. This is a bit gimmicky as a speculative biology feature, but Walton does an excellent job making each culture feel distinct. Also, all of the characters feel fresh and individual, probably because they strongly disagree with each other on everything from basic facts of their world to judgements on other characters. For instance, scheming, ambitious magus Khadsha thinks compassionate Pell who volunteers for a charity is far too softhearted. Gina from our own February 2020 thinks Khadsha's visions of the future are entirely a scam, and she's discovered a bananapants scheme involving Venetian time travel supremacy on Earth which never comes up in any other character's section. It's a delightful mixed bag.
On a number of levels, this book hit what I want out of "cozy fantasy" but never quite find in books that are explicitly marketed as such. The book's stakes are mostly small-scale and intensely personal, with no titanic battles or fate of the world at risk. Still, they matter very much to the characters, whether it's living with chronic illness or the very young Yix struggling to keep her family afloat. While there's not much of a throughline in the plot except the collective manifestation of the doge in the background and the expanding consequences of an AIDS-coded deadly sexually transmitted plague, all of the stories refer back to each other and mesh together in unexpected ways. It felt like a cohesive whole rather than a collection of short stories.
A reading experience that felt very much like the best bits of reading a Septimus Heap book as a kid: all of the little stories at the back telling you about what happened to minor characters. Possibly not my favorite Walton book to date—it's a very competitive field—but bright, conversational, and intriguing, with a sharp touch for worldbuilding. Recommended.
Not only did Radiant Star (Imperial Radch) and Platform Decay (Murderbot Diaries) come out this week and last week, but there's a new Penric and Desdemona novella from Lois McMaster Bujold. That gives me two P&Ds I haven't read yet!
Plus, not new, but I've been reading Jo Walton's Thessaly trilogy for the first time, which has been enthralling and also trippy. What if the goddess Athena decided to create a city based on Plato's Republic, recruited Platonists from all over history and the world to run it, oh, and gave them robots, too? And what if Apollo decided to become mortal for a while and live there? Trippy.
“Bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others.
