This book has a great premise, and is full of some beautifully written prose. It's about a hacker during the Arab Spring, helping people get around the firewalls that the State erected to control its population. Alif falls in love, finds an ancient book, gets into trouble with State, enlists the help of an unseen, magical world full of creatures call Jinn, and combats evil. The story flowed well, and was a fast, fun read. 
 I would have given it a higher rating, but I'm a computer programmer, and for a book that is about hacking the descriptions of Alif coding felt like I was watching one of those movies where they used a bunch of made-up visuals that have nothing to do with hacking. The prose around the hacking was so oddly descriptive you didn't know what to make of it. For instance, when Alif is hacking into State's intranet, it is described as: 
 "The Hand roused. It lumbered to its feet, reeking of ionized air and dry metallic bones, revealing a level of functionality Alif had not detected. He reeled backward, recalibrating. Breaching the confines of the State intranet, the Hand began to attack the base of Alif's tower, slicing away layers of code through a mirroring protocol of a kind Alif had never seen before." 
 I didn't know a computer program could "reek of ionized air" - and can't conceive of how a mirroring protocol (if there is such a thing) could ever be used to "slice away layers of code". 
 (view spoiler)[I wanted so hard for the bit about quantum computing and encoding the ancient story into code to make sense. But it just didn't. And that was the heart of the story - that the ancient text contained an all-powerful computer algorithm. I also had trouble buying the Alif & Dina relationship - the characters just felt shallow to me. (hide spoiler)]