The Oracle of Stamboul

The prose effortlessly conjures the saffron-scented mansions and light dappled alleyways of Istanbul in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, but what will make you devour this book whole is the charming and irrestible young protagonist...

This comes from one of the advertising blurbs, prominently featured on the cover of The Oracle of Stamboul. And the very first pages seemed to agree: A seemingly dense and rich atmosphere was created around the birth of our protagonist, Eleonora, and her hometown, Constanta. But all is not well, as the first signs of cliche are quick to arrive: Eleonoras flock, a swarm of birds that never leaves her and that will have no plot relevance whatsoever over the next 250 pages.

The rest of the book is mostly defined by Eleonoras great passivity. Driven by her father, her aunt, or Moncef Bey and electing not to speak for a great part of the book (instead writing down everything on pieces of paper), she almost never has any influence on any of the diverse (but often quite irrelevant) happenings around her. She is characterized as incredibly intelligent, solving about any task her teachers give her, but it never seems to transfer into the life outside of these clearly defined settings. And of course her intelligence largely only affects the learning of languages and the reading of books, even comparing cryptography with language learning and remarking that she is not good with money. Mathematics should not be too important for an intelligent girl after all.

In the end Lukas writing is inconsistent and full of holes, constantly introducing characters of very little importance, building them up but never letting them have any influence on the plot at large. Eleonora intelligence never causes any interesting decisions to influence the plot either, leaving the story dead in the water.