Central Station follows Boris as he returns to Tel Aviv from Mars. His father is terminally ill, his cousin is infatuated with a robotnik and his ex lover is taking care of an orphan who can read his data stream. Everything seems be growing and evolving in the futuristic area at the base of a space station.
Central Station was a promising read but it sorely disappointed me. Immediately, I disliked the writing style. There were too many overly long sentences and Tidhar overuses commas. It also suffered from too much repetition. As I realised this within a couple of pages, it wasn’t the best start to a book. But I gave it a chance as it is ‘award winning’.
I shouldn’t have even given it a chance. I also struggled to like the characters. There isn’t one main character as we follow different people around, but all of them seem distant and unrelatable. The world building was strong, but at the same time I wasn’t feeling that I could ‘step into’ this world. The fact that this was previously different short stories shows, as it felt very disjointed and thrown together.
I DNF’d this book about 20% in. I don’t think I even got to the actual story as Tidhar had spent most of the time describing the world, the characters, the new technology etc. It just felt like a very longwinded book for a very short sci-fi genre book. I received Central Station* by Lavie Tidhar from the publisher via NetGalley. This is an unbiased and honest review.
