City of Others by Jared Poon

 

Grabbed this off my wife's stack of books going back to the library, after she enjoyed it immensely, and it turned out to be kinda the book I needed this evening. Obviously Book One of a series, but that's fine, sometimes those are plenty charming--and this one is. It's laden with internal drama as well as external, and there's sparkle and wit and even joy just strewn all over it; the prose at times practically sings and quivers with it. Things happen that are supernatural, plausibly even monstrous, but most of the important stuff is deeply human. Really impressively good.