I loved the premise of this book and, as a work of alternate historical narrative, it's brilliant. Everfair feels like a country with a history and events and this could almost be a work of pop history of a place that never was.
I was expecting a book about people, though, and the book's tendency to jump from person to person almost immediately after an event happens in the service of the country's story made it rather difficult for me to care about what happens. Since Everfair isn't real, I wanted people's lives to latch on to and, while a few characters (Lissette and Fwendi) achieved that level of "realness" I associate with fiction, overall they felt like people I should have known about from history, but didn't.
It's a really interesting conceit, but not one that worked completely for me.