Book Review: Kinning by Nisi Shawl

This review was first published by Booklist on January 1, 2024.

**STARRED REVIEW** It’s been eight years since Shawl introduced their alternate-history, anticolonial, steampunk world in Everfair (2016). Kinning is absolutely worth the wait. Immediately following World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution fails, but a group of Chinese socialists discovers a botanical method to generate near-psychic connections between groups of people. They hope to spread this Spirit Medicine to achieve worldwide anticolonialist goals without the need for revolution. Groups of European powers hatch a plan to drain the Mediterranean to gain land to compensate for their losses of colonial territories, and Russia develops an inoculation against influenza with some very unexpected side effects. The kingdom of Everfair remains a prize to be courted by all world powers, and its rulers play a daring game against one other. Kinning is a complex tale with a more explicitly worldwide scope than its predecessor. It offers a nuanced exploration of morality and ethics, greed and selflessness, duplicity and honesty, identity and responsibility, where the balance between individuality and collectivism is constantly at question. The scope of Shawl’s imagination will leave the reader in awe, and their attention to detail is unparalleled. Kinning is a beautiful, hopeful, stunning evolution of one of the most unique alternate histories ever conceived.