Kiersten White “The Chaos of Stars”

Sixteen-year-old Isadora is the daughter of Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris. While a child she adored her beautiful mom and mysterious father and believed that she was immortal like them. Until the day she realized that she’s not going to stay in this world eternally like her parents, instead she’s going to die and her parents don’t do anything to stop it. For Isadora it means only one thing: her parents don’t love her enough to keep her forever.

Feeling hurt and unloved, Isadora is planning to leave Egypt, if she only knows how. When she gets the opportunity to move to San Diego, to live with her older and favourite brother for a while, Isadora jumps on it without hesitation. She starts working in the museum, finds new (or can I say, her first) friends and eats too much sugar. And then there comes a boy. The gorgeous boy with most breathtakingly blue eyes who understands her and is there for her if she needs him. After it turns out that everything is not as well as it seemed and the danger is lurking in the shadows, Isadora needs help more than before.

Isadora is very angry, stubborn and selfish girl who thinks that her parents doesn’t understand her. Some may say that she is annoying, but I think that she seems real, she is sixteen after all. We all have been there in our teenage years, when we were angry at the whole world and thought that our opinion was always right. Thus, even if I don’t agree with everything Isadora says and does, I understand her very well. I think that the author have captured teenage spirit well indeed.

And what is more important, the book has great character development. Over the novel you can see Isadora growing and becoming more understanding and reasonable. She starts admitting her mistakes and realizes that her mother was right. Thus, for me, the novel is mostly the story about becoming an adult.

Mythology part is rather secondary, just background for the mother-daughter relation story. If you are searching serious Egyptian mythology book, then I don’t recommend it. But if you want some quick and light reading with some bits of magic, then give it a go.

There are two extra points I want to give to the book:

  • One for the beautiful cover that was the cause I picked up this book from library shelf altogether.
  • Second for the romance plot. Even if it was quite cliché, at least there was NO love triangle. Finding young adult literature without love triangle can be quite challenging.

***

New York: HarperTeen, 2014

Check from the e-catalogue ESTER

Hanna Laasberg
Department of Estonian Literature

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