Title: Starcrossed
Author: Josephine Angelini
Published: May 31, 2011
Publisher: Harper Teen

Rating:

Synopsis:
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.

I wanted to like you so badly. Greek mythology? Tempting fate and destiny? High school? Small town? Sounds great right?

Nope.

What I get instead is a character named Helen, who is so different from everyone else. She’s beautiful. She’s smart. She’s athletic, freakishly fast and strong. She’s an outcast, the product of a single parent household. She has an overbearing father who wants her to take pills for agoraphobia, a best friend named Giggles and she’s tall.

Whoa, hold up, tall female alert.

I’m sorry. I read this. I really wish I hadn’t. I wish I had listened to my better senses and put it down, to take it back to the library. The writing is really hard to swallow, it shifts between juvenile prose, and something that’s trying entirely too hard. Helen is so hard to get attached to, and I see shades of various other ‘heroines’ in her. There’s nods to Twilight, and The Mortal Instruments series (don’t get me started on the ending), and a few other characters that I know I’ve seen before. Within the first thirty pages she’s going on a tirade about how she hopes “she doesn’t have to breathe the same air as the Delos family”. And that’s my thing right there. Helen is melodramatic one moment and emotionless the next. And I’m not going to get into her reincarnation, or the ‘insta-love’ between her and Lucas. I skimmed the last 100 pages, and even that was too much.

Overall: Don’t bother. I should have listened to the reviews on goodreads.