(edit to add: To be fair, I haven't read that many fantasy books and maybe if I had, I'd have understood and liked this book better. His sci-fi books are chock-full of satirical jabs at the sci-fi genre and its fans, and for all I know, this book has lots of in-jokes and references that flew over my head. Maybe I'd liked it a lot more if I had read Pratchett and other fantasy authors)

This was the first Croshaw book I didn't finish. I read (and greatly enjoyed) two of the "Will x the Galaxy for..." sci-fi books, but this just didn't appeal to me the same way. The premise is interesting: It's a darker take on the House in the Cerulean Sea-type setting where supernatural creatures and magic-attuned people are suppressed by the government and fight to be commonly accepted and normalized, but the book just doesn't pull it off well. The pacing isn't that good, a lot of different things keep happening but they all feel pretty unimpactful. There's a kind of angry Gilderoy Lockhart character who's clearly incompetent yet also incredibly full of himself, but he gets monotonous and predictable really quick. 

There's also satirical jabs at how people in Western societies can twist ourselves into pretzels trying to not offend people and wondering endlessly what words we should use for different people, conditions, and groups, but to be honest it felt a bit overdone, and the analogies felt reaching. To be frank, part of the time it just came across as him trying to be funny at the expense of trans people and other minorities (for example, the trite "but I identify as x" joke was thrown in).

The book also didn't succeed at setting up mysteries that actually hooked me --there's a killer going around murdering shoggoths, but I found myself not really caring who they were. I didn't really care about the shoggoths either, for that matter, they weren't written to be that sympathetic or likable, like the children in The House in the Cerulean Sea, more like a generic minority group that needed protection and spoke funny (their gurgling, slimy way of speaking actually got downright irritating when listening to the audio book). Angry Gilderoy Lockhart is hiding something, but what? I found myself not caring too much about that, either. As a matter of fact, all of the characters felt pretty shallow and stereotypical.

All in all, this was an interesting idea for a book, but in my eyes it didn't do a good job with the story it set out to tell.