This book was not for me. There were a ton of pop culture references and the overall message of the book, while meaningful, was too heavy-handed in my opinion. Each character was introduced with the traits that made them special (race, ethnicity, sexuality, occupation, etc.) and they all had superpowers, due to being the avatars of major cities. This was cool and all, but I felt like the author tried way too hard to be quirky and inadvertently ended up playing into some stereotypes in the process of making her characters super-quirky and diverse. Like, did the main Indian character really need to have

math-related

superpowers? Also, the avatar of Hong Kong literally being named Hong Kong and his accent being described as “Chinese-inflected British English” was straight up weird. The Black characters were fine though, maybe because the author is Black herself. Besides the characters, the pacing was weird and the book wrapped everything up in the last 20 or so pages. It felt like there was so much build-up before they saved the day, and when they did, I wasn’t even sure what was happening.