A review by shesagift
The Mirage by Matt Ruff

4.0

While I got off to a pretty slow start with this one, it really picked up steam once I began to "get" the alternate reality of the world Ruff created. At first it was hard to keep names/places/etc straight, because I'm so used to the world that we actually live in. But once I got it figured out, I all but flew through the rest of the book. Ruff is unceasingly creative through the whole thing, and I love the way he tied together alternate history along with real history and Arab folklore. Without doing so in too in-your-face a manner, Ruff manages to bring to light many questions about terrorism, religion, diplomacy, international relations, and plenty of other controversial and complex ideas that affect us every day in this world.

Though I know this book won't be for everyone -- you've got to be pretty open minded and fairly familiar with the people mentioned so you can appreciate the subversion of the real history -- I really, really enjoyed it, and highly recommend it!