It is a pity the alternate-history flavor didn't come through stronger in this story. Still, it presented an interesting set of characters, an exotic location, and a decent enough mystery. It holds up better than its sequel, "Effendi" ( )

First and lingering impression is that this is Gibson/Stephenson lite. The day-after-tomorrow alterni-future setting did its usual best to confuse and frustrate me (I never know whether the words being dropped are concepts/gadgets that exist or are being made up, which makes getting my head around the worldbuilding difficult) but it was rich and exotic and interesting... sometimes possibly too much so; I felt like occasionally the author was wallowing in atmosphere, and then paring back his action, which made the pacing oddly syncopated for me. Moreover, the rich world stuff - not just the setting, but the accoutrements of the hero and his sidekick - wasn't actually central to the story, which was an unsettlingly simple murder mystery thriller-whodunnit.

That said, I did enjoy the story, and often the telling, even in the wallowing or paring. And if not seated in what Ashraf is, at least who Ashraf is is quite important to the story (and a thing worth talking and thinking about for 300 pages).

There were POV changes mid-sentence, but for once I didn't find that at all troubling, possibly because it was never confusing. Unlike the author's penchant for sentence-fragmenting lengthy run-on qualifying clauses, which tripped me up every single time and meant I had to re-read whole paragraphs.

For example: Hani was worried about something but asking her directly about it hadn't worked. Though he'd tried that several times, starting when he'd got back to the madersa after [character name] flat-lined.

Every time I came across this construction, I read the second sentence like it was starting with a conditional clause, and every single time I got to the end of the clause and found the fullstop and realised it had been a follow-on conditional from the previous sentence. Which I then had to re-read. Every. Single. Time. ( )

A gallop through the exotic El Iskandriya, it's parties and politics, family dramas overlaid with a cyberpunk veneer. Great start to a fascinating trilogy ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2013/07/review-of-pashazade-by-jon-courtenay.ht... ( )

Loved it. Part 1 of the Arabesk trilogy. Speculative fiction set in a vastly different reality where the Ottoman Empire rules the world. Fast, furious and elegant fun. ( )