Alif the Unseen

G. Willow Wilson knows how to write a sentence. The prose here is lovely (I was particularly caught by one simile describing a windowless prison as "both surreal and alarmingly ordinary, like an office building that had blinked"), and her descriptions of life in the modern Middle East are compelling and incisive. What she doesn't seem to know is how to plot a novel.

See my Goodreads for the full review.