I wanted to give this four stars because it was really well written. However, I could not because it was a bit too angsty for my taste. ( )

A very unique book. I loved the fairy/folk tale feel of the book and learned much about these tales in Jewish and Middle Eastern culture. Yet the book was so much more than a magical story; it was about finding your place in this world and the importance of free will. I loved Chava and her journey to find her humanity. ( )

I loved this book. Wecker is a master of nuance and the telling detail.

I completely fell in love with the flawed, heart-achingly complex characters of Chava and Ahmed. Wecker's beautiful writing made all the characters deliciously fascinating, and the setting was so vivid, every time I set the book down, I felt disoriented. I honestly feel like I have been living in the old Jewish and Syrian neighborhoods of turn of the century New York.

I hated for it to end, but it did. And it ended in a way that, unlike so many recent books, did not fizzle or disappoint. Five stars.
( )

The Golem and the Jinni goes on and on and on. A lot of the story could have been edited out and still have had a long story. Three stars were given to this book because it left the reader wanting it to end already. ( )

In middle and high school there were book reports that we'd have to present in front of the class. Every time the straight-A honor students would recite a passionless checklist of all of the required beats expected from them on the rubric. The class was divided in between those who didn't read the book and those who read the words but couldn't care less about the meaning. But the latter category could fake enthusiasm enough to earn perfect grades every time. Meanwhile my impassioned and overlong screed against an esoteric and probably half-imagined theme in the book got me a trip to the principal's office. It was maddening. To this day I can still hear the insincere tone, the forced meter and timbre in the voices of those top students and it makes me cringe.
I mention this because The Golem and the Jinni reads like middle school. There was nothing wrong with it in a technical sense, as though the author were given a rubric and a set of instructions and dutifully hit every one. But it used the same plodding, uninspired, and inartistic tone throughout the entire book. The voice didn't change or modulate between different characters, it didn’t convey the excitement or the fear of the fantasy, or the loneliness of the characters. I've read authors who deliberately eschew impassioned or evocative language in order to convey the numbness of their characters. But Wecker clearly wasn't going for something like that. Something is rotten when you describe a genie creating a glass castle out of the desert sands using the same language as a shopping list.
Abigail Nussbaum’s review in Strange Horizons makes some excellent points: Wecker wrote a vapid historical fiction and then a vapid fantasy and then accidentally left the blender on. ( )