I really enjoyed this, though my desire to classify things has again led me to spend far too much time trying to grasp the difference between urban fantasy and fantasy-that-takes-place-in-a-modern-city, if you count Chicago at the end of the 19th century to be modern, and I do. The city, and the World Fair that's going on there at the same time as the events in the novel, is almost a character in itself. Setting is so interwoven with story here that I'm not sure the novel could be set somewhere else, and if it was it wouldn't be the same. That being said, urban fantasy tends to have supernatural populations of some sort, and this just doesn't. There's only single fantastic element here, a central character is essentially possessed by the soul of a murdered friend, and has to hunt down the murderer, and that very limited application of the supernatural kind of shifts it away from urban fantasy proper, I think.

The experiences of minority immigrants, and of anti-Semitism, permeate the text, and it doesn't help that Alter is gay, a fact that keeps him in many ways isolated from the community that he lives in. I haven't read many books with Jewish protagonists that aren't in some way connected with World War Two, certainly very few fantasies, so it was exciting to find this one. Admittedly, I had to resort to the glossary in the back on occasion, but that just meant that I learned new words, which I always like. I also like the relationships that Alter builds up with the people around him - his love interest Frankie; the middle-aged woman who lives next door and whose help he is always refusing until he realises it's a foolish thing to do; the excruciatingly poor fit of a girl he's set up with in a matchmaking scheme, who turns out to be a really good friend instead... It feels like a living world, a living community of people, instead of an indifferent background against which Alter is going about his life. 

Anyway, I zipped through it in record time, because it flowed so smoothly that I didn't want to put it down. I'll be making sure to look up more books by the author in future!