A review by gobblebook
Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

2.0

There is decent potential here, but the book really falls flat. The plot is uninteresting. Young hacker draws the attention of the government, tries to hide, gets involved with some jinni, eventually saves the world and gets the girl. The plot relies way too much on coincidences: for instance, it just so happens that when Alif realizes he is in trouble, someone makes the plot-moving suggestion of getting help from a guy who turns out to be a jinni. There are also some major plot holes that are never explained: for instance, Alif writes a program that turns out to do some very sophisticated things, and he doesn't understand how the program works. I kept expecting for a jinni to reveal that they had written the program for him or something, but this is never explained, despite the fact that this is the event that gets the whole plot started. The book also suffers from uninteresting characters. Even worse, it has the Trinity problem: just like Trinity from the Matrix, there is a female character who is way more mature, level-headed, and bad-ass than the hero, but in the end she is just a prize for the dumb doofus of a hero. A book about Dina would have been far more interesting than a book about Alif. The characters never really develop: even after being tortured with three months of sensory deprivation, Alif is basically the same person that he was before (okay, sure, he realizes that Dina is important to him, but that just exacerbates the Trinity problem). This is a hacking story, but the hacking aspects were totally ridiculous and unbelievable. Even in a book about jinni, the programming stretched my suspension of disbelief beyond the breaking point. Finally, I couldn't help but think that Wilson has an agenda in this book: to expose Westerners to Islamic culture. That's a good agenda, and frankly that's part of the reason I wanted to read the book. Unfortunately, she doesn't pull it off very well. In her defense, this is something that is hard to do well - very few authors succeed at this sort of thing. The characters end up talking about their culture and their faith in ways that come across as very contrived and even pedantic, because the conversations are pitched for a Western audience that knows little about Islam. I listened to the audiobook, and I wasn't impressed with the narrator, which probably didn't help my perception of the book overall.