An Urban Fantasy without any fantasy.

Well, okay. Maybe that's not being quite fair. There are certainly fantasy elements in the work, but they feel few and far between. The mythical being that we spend the most time with never clicked for me as a supernatural element. He just seemed like a human with a odd birth defect of some sort. The story appears much more focused on establishing the "reality" of the setting than on the fantastic elements of it. The reader gets buried under descriptions of social customs, government policies, and religious debates. And then every so often we get a scene where someone bends the laws of physics to reach a different location. I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me that the prologue was added because someone involved in the publishing of this novel said "Look, if we want to sell this as a fantasy novel, you need to put something involving fantasy in the first half of the manuscript".

It's not offensively bad (although the language does get to be rather salty at times), but it didn't hit the mark for me.