This was fundamentally disappointing, alas. The author writes for Atlas Obscura, and most of this book felt like a series of Atlas Obscura articles: interesting notes that never go much deeper than an internet blog post. I learned very little that I hadn't already known from reading the perpetual articles about fatbergs that come out every winter; the occasional New Yorker article about biofuel creation; and of course the hive mind wisdom that everyone responsible for maintaining their own home's plumbing already knows: 'flushable' wipes aren't flushable.

The focus was almost exclusively London sewers and various US-based municipalities, with the occasional historical commentary on historical sewer systems--mostly in England--and some descriptions of architecture of waste treatment plants that do not include sufficient photographs to actually illustrate the text.

This book gathers together all of those tidbits of information and puts them between the same covers, but if someone is actually interested enough in sewers to read a whole book on them, that person is likely to already know much of what is in this book, and get impatient and frustrated while looking for the rest of the content that isn't there.

NB: I received an advanced copy of this book from Netgalley. Inasmuch as I can be sure of such things, I believe that this has not affected the content of my review.