Crossfire - Nancy Kress

*** A complex story, but a little too much summarised 

“Crossfire” is sci-fi novel about colonisation and first contact. Kress has a runaway imagination and really intriguing narrative ideas, but reading this book at several points I had the feeling of being in front of a draft of a novel rather than a real one.
 In some passages, the author chooses to summarise without letting us see what happens, or to reduce complicated events to a sentence without explaining how the characters could do that way. In other cases she anticipates what will happen, thus eliminating suspense.
 On the other hand, instead, she inserts here and there meditations of the characters that should characterize them better - but in my opinion that turns them into stereotypes - and that should explain the reason for some of their actions, but she does not succeed.
 Considering their inconsistent behaviour you have the impression of being in front of a bunch of madmen, who follow threads of logic that completely escape the reader.
 Perhaps the author wanted to put too many ingredients in the cauldron, which should be distributed at least in a trilogy to be well exploited.
 In any case, the story is pretty entertaining, but the escalation of non-sense, which begins in the middle of the novel and culminates in an improbable ending, prevents me from exceeding the third star.

Crossfire on Amazon.com.

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