Overall, I enjoyed the book. The concept of concepts being personified is something I'll always love and feel should be explored more often. This book was an adventure from the start to finish, and even made me feel for characters who you're supposed to dislike.

As for negatives: sometimes this book got a little too preachy. I will say, I think this may be because the characters of the books are more or less personified concepts, but I don't think that entirely fixes my issue. The issue being that it feels like each character has to preach to the audience about what is good or bad. How calling a woman a "bitch" is sexist, how cutting off a woman is sexist, that racism is bad, that cops are scary, etc. I'm a black trans-masc person and will always appreciate representation, but when the only transgender man in the book is brought in for a few pages, gives some speech about the transphobia he's faced (and later has a small panic that someone found out he's trans), it gets tiring. Sometimes I just want to read a book about diverse characters without needing to be reminded that the world at large hates you.

Secondly, which I can't go into as much detail with, it feels like character development wasn't that focused on in the book. The one who got the most development in my opinion was Staten Island, and unless the sequels expand more on her, she got done the dirtiest. This isn't helped by how sudden the ending is. Everything moves so fast. Conflict sky-rockets, we're thrown into the middle of it, a few pages later, it's over and everything is happy and nice. I suspect this is so the drama the next book brings hits hard, but currently? It's just unsatisfying. I believe a book in a series, or at least the first book of a series, should be strong on its own. It's not fun to read a story, get invested, then be thrown into a brick wall until the author's finishing painting the door, leading into the next story. At least slow me down a little?

Huge fan of Jemisin's other work but this one took me a really long time to get into. If you don't have any prior knowledge of or interest in New York City, you have to wait through half a book of conceptual introduction to get to any amount of characterization. I enjoyed it by the end but if I didn't already love and trust Jemisin there is no way I would have finished this. I prefer more character-driven to plot-driven stories and this was not that. Would recommend to people who love NYC and/or plot-driven modern fantasy. It's well-written but not my thing.