Three and a half stars. 
 I love the richness of the city where the first half of this book happens; the depth of description and the baroque detail to it feel really solid and compelling. The main characters are appealingly, starkly different and interesting in their POV (I am particularly impressed at how well Monette manages to write a POV character who's only semi-lucid, without her writing suffering the same fate). There's clearly some cool political-magical action building for the rest of the series! 
 But I really don't have the stamina for character torture that it would take to love this book wholeheartedly. It took *far* too long before Felix's chapters stopped being able to be summed up as "and then something even worse happened to him!" I'm curious about where it goes from here, and will probably read the others, but warily.