This one was always going to be a hard sell for me, frankly. Urban fantasy and stories about gods walking the earth aren't among my favourites and I often find it hard to connect with them. There's plenty to like here, and I gave it a real effort, but I ended up DNFing at around 37%. 

This has been compared quite widely to American Gods (P.S. Fuck Neil Gaiman), and though I can see the comparison it's fairly surface-level. Both books are about gods walking the earth and interacting with mortals, but that's about where the similarities end. What makes stories like American Gods and G. Willow Wilson's Alif the Unseen work, though, is that they have a mortal character at the centre of them to ground us in the world. Shigidi is lacking that grounding, and I struggled to find any way to connect with the characters - especially Nneoma, a succubus who spends much of the narrative sexually assaulting people.

When the writing is good it's great, but there are moments - particularly in flashback sequences - where it becomes quite plodding and dense, and I felt like those sections were doing little more than providing exposition that didn't yet have any context to be meaningful. I'm sure it all pays off in the end, but I never got to that point.

The main thing I struggled with was trying to take the world that we're presented with seriously. This isn't something unique to Shigidi, it's something I struggle with in lots of urban fantasy when their are shadowy organisations whose role revolves around keeping the magical world secret from mortals. What little we see of the Orisha spirit company reminded me far too much of Monsters, Inc., and I couldn't separate that from Shigidi's early missions to kill humans by sneaking into their bedrooms and inflicting them with lethal nightmares.

I was managing okay with it and willing to give it a chance and see where it was going right up until the point at which Alesteir Crowley became an important character. After a scene in which Nneoma sexually assaults a magically-bound man in an alleyway and then grants Crowley immortality so that he can return to the narrative a hundred years later as a key part of their heist team, I realised that I was enjoying the book less often than I wasn't, and I decided to put it down.