#CBR6 Book 40: "The Chaos of Stars" by Kiersten White

Page count: 288 pages
Rating: 2.5 stars

Disclaimer! I was granted an ARC of this book from HarperTeen via NetGalley in return for a fair and honest review.

Isadora is the youngest mortal daughter of Isis and Osiris, yup, those guys, the Egyptian gods. As seasons passed, and their believers started dying away, Isis found a solution to make sure she, her husband and all their immortal family still have worshippers, by having a mortal child every twenty years. She keeps them close, then sends them out into the world to manage on their own when they're old enough, but they still pray to their parents, thereby ensuring that the deities are not entirely forgotten. Said children can speak all known languages in the world, but Isadora doesn't seem grateful for such an awesome ability.

She's has been at odds with her mother since she got old enough to discover that the fun room she played in when she was little and was encouraged to decorate, was in fact her tomb. The situation doesn't improve when she discovers that her mother is pregnant again, ahead of schedule, as Isadora is only sixteen. She's none to happy about being replaced as the baby of the family, and when Isis (and Isadora herself, although she lies to her mother about it) start having very ominous dreams, she's thrilled to go along with the plan to travel to America to stay with her brother.

Her brother, twenty years her senior, is happily married and expecting a child of his own. Isadora, determined to be as sulky and disagreeable as possible, finds it impossible not to love her new sister-in-law. While she's in the US, she gets a summer job at museum, that's about to host an exhibit of ancient Egyptian artifacts donated by her mother (who everyone just thinks is an Egyptian eccentric). She makes friends with one of the other volunteers at the museum and meets the dreamy and mysterious Ry. While the ominous dreams appear to have stopped, her room at her brother's is broken into and thrashed. Later, the driver delivering the artifacts for the exhibit is attacked. Could her mother be right? Is there someone actually after her?

Isadora may be the daughter of gods, but she's also a pretty whiny and disagreeable brat for much of the book. So what if her father is the king of the underworld and sits at the breakfast table reading the morning papers in his mummy wrappings? It's a lot more fun than having a dad who's an accountant, girl. Her only character traits appear to be that she's very pretty (because of course she is) and has an overwhelming passion for interior decoration. To the point where her internal monologue is constantly critizising every single house and room she ever enters. Despite her surliness, she seems to have no trouble making friends in America. She also meets the unbelievably gorgeous Ry, whose full name is Orion (just like Isadora's favourite constellation, what are the odds? He naturally falls for her instantly, but Isadora keeps pushing him away, because love is for suckers and her parents' tendency to have offspring to ensure their own continued survival as gods has made her wary of trusting anyone.

She's really very self-centred, and not very smart. Ry's mysterious parentage was painfully obvious to me, as was the culprits behind the sinister plot against Isadora and her mother. Yet while I wanted to slap Isadora a whole load of times and tell her to snap out of it and grow up, I kept turning the pages to see where the story was going and I really did like the concept of ancient gods having mortal children to keep their names from being forgotten. I'm sad that the gorgeous cover and fun concept didn't play out into a particularly good book, but while I don't see myself re-reading the book, I certainly didn't hate it.

CBR3 Book 64: "The Throne of Fire" by Rick Riordan

Publisher: Puffin
Page count: 451 pages
Rating: 4 stars
Date begun: August 6th, 2011
Date finished: August 7th, 2011

This is the second book in the Kane Chronicles, and this review may therefore contain some spoilers for the previous book, The Red Pyramid. You probably want to go read that one first, although it's by no means a requirement. You get the events of the previous novel neatly summarized in case this is your first meeting with the Kane siblings.

It's been a few months since their last adventure, and Sadie and Carter Kane now have a whole slew of students at their headquarters in Brooklyn, dedicating themselves to various Egyptian gods and slowly learning to control their own magical powers. Yet again, the siblings have to set out on a quest with a very tight deadline, as Apophis, the embodiment of chaos, is about to escape his prison in four days' time, and when he does, he will swallow the sun and cast the world into chaos. The only way to prevent this, is for the Kanes to locate the three parts of the Book of Ra, so they bring the old king of the Egyptian pantheon back to fight Apophis.

Cue another quest, with many exciting action sequences, multiple international locations, among them St. Petersburg. The Kane siblings split up more in this book, and as always, the narrative alternates between Carter and Sadie. While looking for the Book of Ra, Carter keeps receiving warnings that bad things will happen to Zia, the girl he fell in love with in the previous book. He's obsessed with finding her, and Sadie has her own troubles, with her thirteenth birthday ruined by a giant vulture and baboon chasing her and her friends through London, and her adolescent heart torn between one of the new trainees, Whit, and the immortal Anubis.

Like the last one, this book introduces its readers to a whole host of Egyptian gods, both minor and major and explains several rather difficult concepts while still being entertaining action romps. I suspect these books may appeal to a slightly older age group than the Percy Jackson series, as there is more ambiguity and more complex issues are adressed in them. I certainly enjoyed it, although it does drag and can get a bit repetitive at times with the "new location, danger, kids get out of danger". I also discovered, during my browsing of the Internets, that there is just one more volume in this series. Having assumed that it was going to run to five books, like the Percy Jackson books, I'm delighted that I'll be able to read the conclusion to the trilogy some time next year.

CBR3 Book 51: "The Red Pyramid" by Rick Riordan

Publisher: Puffin
Page count: 544 pages
Rating: 4 stars
Date begun: June 25th, 2011
Date finished: June 29th, 2011

In the course of last year, I read the entirety of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, where young Percy Jackson finds out that he is a demi-god and son of the Greek god Poseidon. He and several of his friends, who are either demi-gods or other mythological beings, go on many adventures and quests, usually to save the world from destruction.

Rick Riordan has clearly found a winning formula, and if it ain't broke, he ain't gonna fix nothing. Having successfully sold millions in a series based on Greek mythology, he gleefully takes on Egyptian myth in his new series, this time with two new, young protagonists, siblings Carter and Sadie Kane. Carter has travelled the world with his father, famous archeologist Dr. Julius Kane, while after a very bitter custody hearing after Mrs. Kane's death, Sadie has been raised in London by her grandparents. She only sees her father and brother twice a year, for a day at a time. The kids are mixed race, with Sadie apparently taking after her blonde, English mother (i.e looking Caucasian), while Carter looks like his African American dad.

It's just before Christmas, Carter and his dad are in London to see Sadie, and Dr. Kane drags both his children to the British Museum, acting very shifty all the while. Once in there, he proceeds to blow up the Rosetta Stone with magic, releasing all sorts of trouble in the process. Suddenly everything Sadie and Carter thought they knew is turned on its head. They find out that both their parents are from ancient bloodlines with strong magical abilities, that in trying to right a great wrong, their father accidentally released five Egyptian gods, including Set, god of Chaos, and that they have approximately six days to set everything right, or the world might get destroyed.

So, new mythology, new protagonists, same old quest narrative. I read the Percy Jackson books over the course of a whole year, and didn't really feel that they became quite as repetetive as this book did. It was entertaining, and Riordan really does integrate some pretty complex mythological facts in his adventure books for teens. The Egyptian pantheon and mythology is, in my mind, quite a bit more complicated than the Greek, yet Riordan integrates it very well. The narration changes between Carter and Sadie, and over the course of the book we get to know both characters well. There's very few quiet moments, it jumps from dangerous situation to dangerous situation, in ever changing locations - London, New York, Cairo, Paris and so forth. There's a clear time limit, and the kids are under a lot of pressure. I would have liked some of the book to calm down from its breathless pace, but all in all, it wasn't bad, and I will look out for the next book in the series, especially to see if Sadie's crush on the hunky Anubis goes anywhere.