"People did not talk to each other out here [Logan Square]. Typically when someone said, 'Good morning,' she cringed, already reaching for her weapon in her mind. 'Good morning' was never good morning in the city. Nor was 'Good evening,' 'Hello,' or 'How are you?' Any greeting from a stranger in the city could be an animalistic strategy, a predator inadvertently alerting prey to his presence. What most predators failed to realize was that in Chicago you could never be too sure if another predator was present."

The main character is a cop who hates the city she lives in, and her only character trait aside is that she drinks coffee. That's cool I guess.

The author was born and raised in "inner City Chicago" as per the back cover panel, and I'm really concerned about her read on this city. It's one thing to fantasize about a folklore Boogeyman gruesomely slaughtering children in the city you live in, but when the whole book is leading the reader towards the thesis that it's because Chicago is so inherently vile to begin with, it only makes sense that these murders would occur, I start to question whether there's some undue bias going on here.

Another quote from the book touches on Al Capone for no other reason but to continue painting the city even blacker, dubiously asserting that "No evidence ever connected Capone to the crime, but everyone knew he did it. In Chicago, criminals very often got away with it."

Or even more comical, "Jamal told him how limbs, torsos, heads, and bodies were tossed in that same lagoon in the 1980s through to the early 2000s...Drowned bodies and body parts were not an unusual find in Chicago's lake, river or lagoons."

Every chapter feels like there is a random aside about how trashy the Windy City is, with Pelayo going so far as to write her protagonist arguing "That was one of the many terrible things about Chicago. So, few people remained in this city of wind for long, blown away by hope or terror."

She gets egregiously more dour, too, over exaggerating about the percentage of CPS kids who go on to graduate from 4-6 year universities, because I suppose that just makes the city seem even more doomed and unlivable.

In Children of Chicago, Pelayo makes Chicago her lead character. Yet, there is very very little (likely nothing) redeemable about it. Further, the protagonist is a cursed, traumatized cop who has an unaccountable history of drawing and firing her weapon and spends the entire book grousing about all the ostensible violent crime in Chicago. What purpose does any of this serve, at a time where the media continues to overblow crime and violence in large urban centers in America? There are tactful ways to have fun with folk horror, but this felt really really tone deaf.