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54 lines
2.6 KiB
54 lines
2.6 KiB
4 years ago
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title = "Central Station - Lavie Tidhar"
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date = 2021-01-20
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["books", "reviews", "fantasy", "scifi", "books:2021", "1 star",
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"lavie tidhar"]
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[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25986774-central-station):
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When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris’s
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ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream
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of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a
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robotnik—a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His
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father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted
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data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return.
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<!-- more -->
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{{ stars(stars=1) }}
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There is something incredibly satisfying in reading a book in which the
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characters are not some sort of American-centered or -inspired story -- heck,
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even [All You Need Is Kill](@/reviews/books/all-you-need-is-kill.md) feels a
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lot like an American story than a Japanese one. But here? No. Names are
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"alien", 'cause you're not used to see them, like mixing Chinese and Russian
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names. And Hebrew names. And the location doesn't look like the general things
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we usually read.
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But while the ambience feels nice, the plot doesn't. I mean, sure, there are
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some incredible elements that could be explored in future novels, but here they
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are thrown and forgotten and never really explored properly. You have children
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with weird abilities that are never explained; you have a diseased women whose
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sickness grants some powers, but something mythical happens with her (and the
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children) and then she suddenly disappears. Was she cured? Does she lives a
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normal life now? Does the mythical thing killed her?
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And you have some mythical gods walking around, something that people take as
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annoyance, but they appear only after the middle of the book, out of the blue.
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I mean, sure, by the description, they are annoying -- 'cause they are gods,
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after all, and can do whatever, whenever they want -- and people doesn't seem
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to really like them, but how the heck we spent this whole time without knowing
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anything about them? And then, this god appears, do some crazy things, and
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disappear and never mentioned again.
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This kind of "starting a thread and never putting a connection in them" happens
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over and over again, just ruining the feeling from the book.
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And the ending... It feels like the author simply decided "Ok, I had enough; I
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need an ending" and just put something there to mark it as ended and gone.
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There is a lot of points that could be explored in the future from here, but
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here... not much is.
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