Review- Starcrossed

Title: Starcorssed

Author: Josephine Angelini

Published: 31 May 2011

Pages: 496

Rating: 4/5

ARC from NetGalley!

Synopsis provided by GoodReads:

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 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.

My thoughts:

This is the first modern retelling of Greek mythology that I've read and I really liked it. It starts off with the main character, Helen, who seems to be this really shy girl who does not know her own strength and beauty. She thinks she too tall, too awkward, too ugly and pretty much a freak in her small town and high school. As soon as the Delos family moves to town, she starts having these nightmares of walking through a desert, looking for a river. The first time she sees Lucas Delos, all she wants to is kill him and she is even seeing these three women in the background who are crying blood and encouraging her to kill him. No matter how hard she tries to stay away from him, they're like magnets pulling toward each other.

After a few chapters, the book goes into the whole explanation of why they want to kill each other and what happened during the Trojan war to make all the houses of the gods want to see each other die. This part was kind of confusing and I felt like I needed to watch the movie Troy (you know, the one with Brad Pitt) because I recognized so many of the characters names from the movie in the book. I was able to understand enough to where I could understand the story line.

And then it just gets absolutely amazing after that. The discovery in the end was just so heartbreaking I still don't want to believe that it's true. Angleini did an amazing job of setting up the the scene for the next book. Which only makes the wait that much harder because this books hasn't even been released yet!

I definitely recommend this book to those who enjoy the supernatural genre. It's a good change of pace from reading all those vampire and werewolf novels!