This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Everybody’s Perfect was released on June 30, 2026.

I’ve heard a lot about Jo Walton—both for her fiction and her nonfiction—but the only novel of hers I’d read was Lifelode, a strange, experimental piece that started strong before ending much more conventionally. The author herself has cited a desire to become more adept at handling unconventional fantasy plots, and that promised to be on full display in Everybody’s Perfect, a short novel set in a shadowy, magical Venice that serves as a hub connecting nine worlds. So there was plenty of reason for me to give her newest book a try. 

Everybody’s Perfect is split into nine chapters from nine different first-person perspectives representing nine different worlds. The majority of these chapters sit near the 30-page mark, jumping back and forth between backstory—both for the individual characters and the various connected worlds—and the main action, the latter of which takes place largely in a stretch of only a couple days during which the shadow world’s power structures undergo radical change. 

With so many different races from various fanciful worlds, there was always going to be a tricky balance between infodumping and leaving the reader completely befuddled—particularly in a novel that commits to nine perspective characters and doesn’t repeat a single one. There’s simply not enough time to get attached to a character before perspective switches to another and the reader must learn yet another character from another world. In the first two or three chapters, that structure does pose a challenge, but not a challenge unfamiliar to regular readers of fantasy. Frontloaded worldbuilding is quite common in the genre, and readers—especially readers of less recent fantasy—should be well prepared to simply take it all in, giving the author the time to develop the major story threads. 

One of those threads is a deadly sexually transmitted infection that as of yet cannot be cured at all and can only be treated within the shadow world at the story’s heart. Not only does that leave the afflicted unable to return to their home worlds, it also creates a severe social stigma that feels heavily informed by the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. The story’s first perspective character is one of those afflicted and is also prone to prophetic dreams. One such dream in which a doge marries the sea—not in Venice, where this is custom, but in the shadow world, which has no doge—forms the basis of the story’s second major thread. 

While there’s a bit of disorientation in the opening chapters, almost all of the subsequent perspective characters appear first as secondary characters in someone else’s perspective section. That keeps the story from feeling like it’s starting anew with each section, as the reader starts each new section with some familiarity both with the new perspective character and with the background events that shape their stories. Often, a new segment will backtrack to the beginning of the day, detailing what this particular character had been doing before they crossed paths with the characters of the previous chapters. With a main plot limited to just a couple days, that intertwining lends a sense of focus and cohesion to a story that could otherwise feel scattered. 

While the political and medical events do lend the story some cohesion and plot structure, Everybody’s Perfect is far from a plot-driven book. It’s just as much an exploration of nine different characters who come from nine different places and the way their cultural and circumstantial differences  inform their lives in a world where none are native and logic doesn’t always hold sway. And there are some really strong pieces here, even if not all of them hit the same way. 

Despite a dreamlike setting, the circumstantial elements are quite concrete. It’s easy to feel for a character backed into a corner by illness, or poverty, or familial responsibility. None of these elements constitute a main story, but they do provide genuine conflicts that serve to keep the reader engaged and emotionally invested even in the absence of an eye-catching main plot. 

The cultural elements can be more of a mixed bag. One of the clearest messages deals with the cultural contingency of attitudes about gender and sexuality. Seeing the way in which so many different cultures develop radically different norms pushes the reader toward the conclusion that many of these attitudes are cultural constructs that don’t map neatly onto deep, enduring features of the world. But describing a very different culture is not the same as making the reader believe it. So while it may be easy to look askance on a society whose rigid gender essentialism maps not onto arrangement of sexual organs but rather on the time of day in which someone is born, it’s much harder to view the latter as the sort of feature that’s so obvious at a glance that it colors even the most superficial of interactions. The cultural relativity point doesn’t hit the same way if the reader isn’t fully convinced by the portrait of a culture. 

However, the cultural contingency point hits very hard in other aspects. Because the main setting is so dreamlike and heavily influenced by belief, it can be changed dramatically by the rapid spread of ideas. Far from seeming implausible, this element feels simply like a more extreme version of a real-world phenomenon, and the development of the main story drives it home in a way that’s narratively satisfying while also being thematically thought-provoking. 

And on the whole, Everybody’s Perfect is a thought-provoking book, with an engaging writing style and a satisfying central arc. There may still be myriad loose threads at the end and a few alien cultures that don’t feel as believable as the rest, but they don’t hold the overall story back from being a compelling read. One has to be patient through some disorientation and heavy worldbuilding at the outset, and one must give up on the expectations of a clear central character or propulsive main plot, but for the right sort of reader with the right sort of mindset, Everybody’s Perfect is a fascinating novel. 

Recommended if you like: dreamlike settings, mosaic-adjacent stories.

Can I use it for Bingo? It’s Published in 2026 and features several Non-human Protagonists. It’s also hard mode for Politics.

Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.