Book: The Chaos of Stars

Author: Kiersten White

Genre: Teen Fiction/Mythology/Romance/Coming of Age

Summary: Isadora’s family is seriously screwed up. Of course, when you’re the human daughter of Egyptian gods, that comes with the territory. Isadora’s sick of living a life where she’s only worthy of a passing glance, and when she’s offered the chance to move thousands of miles away, she jumps on it. But as much as Isadora tries to keep her new world and old world apart, she quickly realizes there’s no such thing as a clean break when it comes to family. - HarperTeen, 2013.

This was fluffy and ridiculous and full of emailing ancient gods to keep in touch and I had a kind of glorious time with it. 

Isadora is hard to like. She is one of those teenagers that makes me feel so much better about my own teen years because as problematic as I was, I was not at this level of awful. She is the meanest and most selfish member of a group who apparently, even before meeting her, liked to go down to the beach and mock people's swimwear as a pastime.

Just chew on that for a moment. 

She's anti-children, she's anti-love, she's anti-any good feeling like ever except those that come from interior design, and she also suffers from being the least interesting character in the novel. When she finally does get around to changing, she did it way too quickly, as well, which made it feel unreal. The novel would have been significantly more fun if it had not been filtered through her hateful viewpoint.

Which is a shame, because the rest of the novel was nothing but fun. Hard to take very seriously, really, but there is nothing wrong with that, personally, and I loved watching the ancient gods of Egypt handling the modern world and their extremely messed up relationships. Isis in particular was fabulous, but I loved all the little details of the ancient mythology of the gods followed by bursts of what they were actually doing living day-to-day and not just on the cosmic stage.

Set and Osiris get together once a week to play board games.

Ry was adorable, although I started figuring things out with him way before Isadora did. 

In the end, I liked that this was a fun, fluffy ride that used Egyptian mythology (which is ignored way too often, I feel), but it was definitely not more than that. I'd love to see something take the basic premise and run with it, but it is probably not the kind of thing that lends itself to serious treatment. 

If you always let yourself love others, you'll get back more than you give.