Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author has been a dear friend since the mastodons roamed the plains.
It seems like half of the reviews out there claim that the book they’re reviewing is something really different, but this, in fact, is something really different. It’s like Marguerite Yourcenar’s A Coin in Nine Hands, where the story passes from person to person as they encounter each other, showing different facets of life. But it’s also very much not like that, because the story is a fantasy story with crucial worldbuilding, and the quiet nature of its plot makes it easy to miss that it’s about massive social change.
Serenissima is not Venice, though they are connected. Serenissima, city of the mists, is the point that joins nine worlds, each filled with a sentient humanoid species, living and trading and growing and learning across worlds. No matter how long anyone has lived in Serenissima, no one person knows all of its secrets–so they need to work together to cure the blight that has stranded some of them there.
Because yes, this is a Venice Carnival mask book–but it’s also a book that couldn’t have been written in 2019. It is a book with strong awareness of the pandemic we’ve been going through, and all the ways in which it’s only one possible way that we could suffer–and need to help each other. It’s a book with a strong sense of forming community with others, even when those others don’t fit our preconceptions of what a friend, an ally, a lover might look like. I really like the gentleness and the hope in this one. I think you might like it too.