The bastard of Istanbul is an engaging story about women leading lives in modern day Turkey. What could have been easily stereotypical move, somewhere in the second third of the novel, Elif Shafak changes the tone of her characters. This shoves the preconceived notions of a culture to the side as the protagonist, Asya, delivers some of the most poignant lines in the novel. 
 Elif Shafak toes the line between being casual and pragmatic with her writing. While she throws in tidbits about Armenian genocide with multi-generational Turkish lives serving as the distinct voices in the book, thematically they are never taken to completion. The conversations seem dangling and the thought process unfinished. 
 The bastard of Istanbul is a window to a culture that sits on the precipice of becoming "modernized" and tied to a difficult past at the same time just like the protagonists of this book.