Long-time fan, grabbed as part of the 2025 Hugo voting packet for best series. Thank you to the publisher! :)

Book downloaded from Hugo's Nominees Packet 2025. To be read during the coming year with the rest of the series.

An excellent start to a series about the cryptids who live in plain sight and the family who look after them. I really liked the tension between Verity's desire to dance and her loyalty to the family profession. You can tell the world is a lot bigger than this one story and I look forward to seeing more of it

An entertaining start to the series, although there are a couple of scenes where I'm not sure if McGuire quite gets how to write action. Will keep going. (Thanks, Hugo Voters Packet!)

4 stars. A really great start to a fairly unique seeming urban fantasy series with an emphasis on family dynamics, the “science” of magical creatures, and conflict between two factions in particular rather than all the factions in the world. I had a really good time with this, particularly with the voice of the protagonist, Verity Price, and her funny and charming commentary throughout the story. She and her family are really well drawn characters in this book alone. I wish the book had more of a character arc for her, giving the arc instead to her foil character, as I think it would’ve made some of the middle of the book feel more engaging than a series of events that we’re following to get to the conclusion, but it’s a minor quibble. Overall a really fun story and I can’t wait to read more.

I think your enjoyment of this book is going to come down to this: imagine a blonde ballroom dancer spinning on a poll as she shoots a gun and tosses throwing knives at the supernatural forces trying to harm her while Hey Yeah! by Outkast blares on the sound system. Do you think that's awesome or that's cringe?

There wound up being a lot of things that raised my eyebrows in this book, from an M/F romance that felt really forced to just letting a monster that killed 15 women go scot-free if he promised to leave the city. But there was enough good in here that I'm tempted to pick up the next book. I loved the dragon princesses. I liked that Verity is a "badass snarker girl" who is actually funny and can legitimately fight unlike the last few books I encountered professing to feature this archetype (even if she's not as smart as someone in her position should be). If I can count on McGuire for anything, it's to come up with cool monsters and beasties and this book did deliver on that front. It was a fun popcorn read, even if I did almost DNF it when it looked like we were heading into a sex scene (which was mercifully fade-to-black).

Note: I received a galley copy of this book for purposes of awards voting.

A solid 3.5/5. A fun distraction of a book.

This book reads a bit like Supernatural fan fiction with a bit of a Mary Sue protagonist. Actually she comes from a whole family of Mary Sues who we mostly only meet over the phone. But given that there appear to be several dozen books in this series if you include both the main-line and prequel/sequel books I imagine that a reader will get to meet most of them.

The worldbuilding was nice, and for the first book in what was definitely planned on being a long series it does a decent job of hinting at things without having to explain everything that isn't needed for the given story.

The characters were interesting, though there were enough of them that many didn't get much "screen time".

Seanan McGuire has created a complex structure of interlocking stories. In duets or trilogies, we see the world from a particular viewpoint, and continue to widen the perils and scope of the world. I'm giving Incryptid my first place vote for best series in the 2025 Hugos. No other nominee is expanding and informing the idea of a series as well as she is.

Fun start to an urban fantasy series. There was some humor, the heroine is pretty kick ass and...ballroom dancing? My favorite parts were the many different creatures - especially the religious mice - and the chapter headings. I'll certainly continue on with the series - this is a world I want to explore more. I like the many "monsters" in the world - both scary and funny. Once again, Seanan McGuire's brain has created a great concept.

I came to this book since the 2025 Hugo Awards mentioned it as a candidate for best series, against big competition. I thought it would not stand to scrutiny but it more than made its impact on me as a great book.

It is urban fantasy, which like since it is not on the usual “realms” of some distant European past. It happens in Manhattan. The city serves the purpose of the background where the story develops around its uniqueness. The protagonist is witty, funny, and a complete badass. I hope this continues through the whole series. The cryptids are well thought out and fit the story perfectly, with great results. The villains also stand out.

It left me touched and with joy. Looking forward to book #2. I gave it 5 ⭐️.

This book was so much fun! I am not normally an urban fantasy reader, but this really worked for me. The characters were interesting, the setting was good, and the plot was fun! I am looking forward to continuing the series!

This book is quintessential McGuire! We get to enjoy the exploits of cryptozoologist Verity Price along with her family, enemies, friends, and coworkers as they defend and save New York (and themselves). As usual, McGuire dishes up humor, adventure, suspense, and a delightful world of supernatural creatures that are more human than human living among us. I really enjoy this series.

I thank the author and publisher for kindly sharing a review copy of this work!

The cryptids in Manhattan are starting to go missing, and Verity Price, aspiring professional ballroom dancer and youngest daughter of the Price-Healy clan of cryptozoologists/monster hunters, has to figure out what's going on and stop it from getting worse.

The InCryptid series has been nominated for this year's Best Series Hugo award, and it has... um... *thirteen* eligible novels (plus a bunch of short stories, novellas, etc.), so if I'm going to do any sort of informed voting on this category, I'd better dive in. (Fortunately, I'm *mostly* caught up on Stormlight already, or I'd be writing the category off entirely.) This is an enjoyable read, with engaging characters and strong worldbuilding; I'd especially like to highlight the setting description lines at the beginning of each chapter, which do an excellent job getting us into the often irreverent head of Verity-as-narrator. Sometimes, Book 1 of a series feels incomplete without a sequel; this one does not, but has plenty of potential hooks should one be desired (and considering how many more stories McGuire has since written in this setting, clearly they were).

In addition to reading this for the 2025 Hugo Awards, I'm also reading this for the 2025 edition of /r/Fantasy Bingo. Annoyingly, the only two squares on this year's card that it definitively qualifies for are Small Press/Self-Published (by the letter of the square's definition, I think DAW still counts as a Small Press even after its acquisition by Astra; it might also qualify for hard mode, depending on if being female is enough to count as a marginalized author) and Recycle a Previous Year's Square (hard mode - 2024: Prologues/Epilogues HM, among others); Recycle is functionally a wildcard, and Small Press/Self-Pub is also not something I'm expecting to have trouble with. Gods/Pantheons might be an interesting one to try to justify, at least from the perspective of the Aeslin mice; and you could plausibly argue that Dominic counts as a Stranger in a Strange Land, this being his first major experience outside of Covenant spaces (in addition to him being an Italian in Manhattan). As far as High Fashion goes, clothing's importance to the story is mostly limited to Verity's recurring complaints that you can't hide enough weapons under a ballroom dance costume or a cocktail waitress uniform.

Got a copy for Hugo review purposes! It genuinely felt like cotton candy for my brain, not the most exciting or innovative bit of writing, but I DID have a lot of fun with it!!