Central Station - Lavie Tidhar

GoodReads Summary: When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris’s ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik—a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return.

There is something incredibly satisfying in reading a book in which the characters are not some sort of American-centered or -inspired story -- heck, even All You Need Is Kill feels a lot like an American story than a Japanese one. But here? No. Names are "alien", 'cause you're not used to see them, like mixing Chinese and Russian names. And Hebrew names. And the location doesn't look like the general things we usually read.

But while the ambience feels nice, the plot doesn't. I mean, sure, there are some incredible elements that could be explored in future novels, but here they are thrown and forgotten and never really explored properly. You have children with weird abilities that are never explained; you have a diseased women whose sickness grants some powers, but something mythical happens with her (and the children) and then she suddenly disappears. Was she cured? Does she lives a normal life now? Does the mythical thing killed her?

And you have some mythical gods walking around, something that people take as annoyance, but they appear only after the middle of the book, out of the blue. I mean, sure, by the description, they are annoying -- 'cause they are gods, after all, and can do whatever, whenever they want -- and people doesn't seem to really like them, but how the heck we spent this whole time without knowing anything about them? And then, this god appears, do some crazy things, and disappear and never mentioned again.

This kind of "starting a thread and never putting a connection in them" happens over and over again, just ruining the feeling from the book.

And the ending... It feels like the author simply decided "Ok, I had enough; I need an ending" and just put something there to mark it as ended and gone.

There is a lot of points that could be explored in the future from here, but here... not much is.