Review Starcrossed- Josephine Angelini

Starcrossed by Josephine Angelini

“How do you defy destiny?

Helen Hamilton has spent her entire sixteen years trying to hide how different she is—no easy task on an island as small and sheltered as Nantucket. And it's getting harder. Nightmares of a desperate desert journey have Helen waking parched, only to find her sheets damaged by dirt and dust. At school she's haunted by hallucinations of three women weeping tears of blood . . . and when Helen first crosses paths with Lucas Delos, she has no way of knowing they're destined to play the leading roles in a tragedy the Fates insist on repeating throughout history.

As Helen unlocks the secrets of her ancestry, she realizes that some myths are more than just legend. But even demigod powers might not be enough to defy the forces that are both drawing her and Lucas together—and trying to tear them apart.”(Good Reads)

I want to say right from the start that I really enjoyed this book. I checked this out from my local library, (which is where I get most of my books from) but will be buying a copy of my own once it comes out in paperback. For some reason I prefer paperback. Let me also say that I was hooked on this book from page 3.

I have not a single review of this book because I do not want it to interfere with my own opinions. I do want to take a quick moment to say that I know people will find major comparisons to The Twilight Series here, and that is fine. There are some major points for comparisons such as: having special powers, girl who lives only with her dad, fast cars, being rich, a group of family members that arrive to town and have many students at the high school, and all of them living in a big house together. Obviously you can’t avoid the comparisons and any reader who has read Meyer’s series will take note of these. Did I care? Nope. I loved that series and I love this series.

Anyway, this book is mainly told from the point-of-view of Helen Hamilton. She lives in Nantucket and attends the high school where she meets the 5 new Delos kids. Things start to get out of control when Helen finds that she literally wants to kill them....Mythology plays a very large role in this book, and Josephine obviously did her research. It is not hard to keep track of how the characters relate to their mythology counterpart. I believe that Angelini does such a great job with world building and characters. There are so many great characters in this book! I did feel a little bad for Noel since all she does is cook for…well, read it and see what I mean. Apparently she likes it, though. These are the kind of characters where you wish that they were yours to play around with. Does anyone know what I am talking about? I found myself constantly flipping forward in the book to get to the romantic bits and rereading parts that I really liked. In short, I couldn’t get through it fast enough.

My two/three only complaints about this book were the big, descriptive paragraphs at the beginning of the book. Do not get bogged down with this because this only occurs for the first 30 pages or so. Also, there are two to three times where the point-of-view randomly switches during the book to either Lucas’s or Creon’s. I just found this weird since the whole thing is basically from Helen’s standpoint. There are a couple of scenes that are described in such a weird way at first that the reader (at least me) was wondering what was going on. (Flying/Other Dimensions etc) One final thing is that I noticed three or four really obvious errors in the book that didn't get fixed in the editing process. Most of these were where there was an extra word in the sentence that didn't belong in the sentence at all. I know that editing a book is hard work and there are bound to be mistakes, but these were so obvious that it immediately pulled me out of the story. Maybe hardcover first editions always have big editing mistakes that get fixed for the paperback?

This is a book that I definitely recommend and will be purchasing myself once it comes out in paperback. I will be continuing on with this series and can’t wait to get my hands on Dreamless.