Synopsis
Dive into a world where magic lies hidden just below the surface in this charming urban fantasy full of workplace found family, queer romance, and supernatural creatures straight out of Southeast Asian lore, from debut author Jared Poon.
In the sunny city of Singapore, the government takes care of everything—even the weird stuff.
Benjamin Toh is a middle manager in the Division for Engagement of Unusual Stakeholders (DEUS), and his job is straightforward: keep the supernatural inhabitants of Singapore happy and keep them out of sight. That is, don’t bother the good, normal citizens, and certainly don’t bother the bosses. Sure, he’s overworked and understaffed, but usually, people (and senior management) don’t see what they don’t want to see.
But when an entire housing estate glitches out of existence on what was meant to be a routine check-in, Ben has to scramble to keep things under control and stop the rest of the city from disappearing. He may not have the budget or the bandwidth, but he has the best—if highly irregular and supernaturally inclined—team to help him. Together, they’ll traverse secret shadow markets, scale skyscrapers, and maybe even go to the stars, all so they can just do their goddamn job.
Review
City of Others is my first debut of 2026 and what a debut that was! I immediately asked about book 2 after I finished it. Creative, heartwarming, and exciting, this was a fun arc to receive.
I want to say this was my first book set in Singapore and I really enjoyed the Southeast Asian lore in the urban fantasy setting. While the magic was pretty handwavy and sometimes did feel a little convenient here and there, overall it was neat to see how the various creatures, magical humans, and other Others interacted and lived around each other.
The storytelling was interesting and something that doesn’t always work for me. Poon though managed to make it fit this narrative really well. It almost had this cozy and confidential feeling to it, like the narrator was telling the story to us directly. Things are explained to the reader when it’s not necessarily needed in the story itself because the characters already know these things. They’re done specifically for the benefit of the reader. That oftentimes feels like info dumps and too convenient, pulling me out of the story. Here though, it works because it already feels like the MC is talking to us and wants to make sure we’re able to follow along with the necessary knowledge. It probably also helped that I just really enjoyed learning all these bits and pieces. It makes me wonder which aspects were purely for the benefit of this magical world and which came from real-life inspirations.
I know some people struggle with foreign words used in books, but I thought this was handled really well. While I didn’t understand everything, the words and phrases that were very important to the story usually were explained soon after being used. I did choose to look up some extra ones here and there, which helped me form a better picture in my head, but overall Poon did a good job explaining what was necessary.
The characters were really fun, with a bit of a found family feel to it by the end. The story was narrated from a single POV, but we also got to know his parter and close coworkers. The MC had an extreme emotional awareness, which probably would’ve felt too forced in other stories but worked here due to his magical abilities. I liked watching his transformation from being very independent to accepting his found family. Though I really liked his partner as well, that character did feel a little inconsistent sometimes, going from not knowing and understanding much to suddenly knowing a lot about supernatural things. I’m not sure if his intuition just worked well in those settings or what. Overall though, I liked this group and thought they were great to follow through this adventure.
Those were a lot of words to say I liked these people, the setting, the magic, the lore… Book 2 is apparently being edited now so hopefully it won’t be too long before I can get my hands on it. I like it when authors take a very mundane job, like a government worker here, and spin a fun fantasy tale around it. It worked for me in Fred the Vampire Accountant, in The Justice of Kings, and in My Boss is the Devil. Though not all of those had the same vibes, if you also like that kind of thing, definitely give City of Others a try! Speaking of vibes though, fans of Jester by Tim Carter might also enjoy the narrative style with its cozy aspects and humor!
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