[REVIEW] My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

I am worried about being in love, because it involves asking so much. —David Levithan, Your Temporary Santa

Title: My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

Author: Varies
Edited by: Stephanie Perkins

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Publishing Year: 2014

Number of Pages: 336

ISBN: 978-146-6863-89-7

I rate it 3.5/5 stars

One thing I love about short story written by various authors is that I can meet so many authors without having a long time reading their two-hundred-pages-or-so books. (Yes, I am that lazy, sorry~) x) But it is not really a reference point whether I would read their other books later. It is not fair, because who knows the authors were not in their writing-state whenever they wrote that story, right?

I have met several authors in this book, say Ally Carter with her Gallagher Girls series, Gayle Forman with her If I Stay series, Jenny Han with her To All the Boys I've Loved Before (which I love so much!), David Levithan with his Every Day, Stephanie Perkins with her Anna and the French Kiss, Rainbow Rowell with her Eleanor & Park, and Kiersten White with her The Chaos of Stars (this one I've just read last month and I loved it too!), though I didn't review all of them here. :p I love their previous books, and that's one of the reason I expected so much when they contributed in this short story.

But the thing about expect-something-too-much is often left us with disappointment. x) This happened to me when I read David Levithan's in this book with his Your Temporary Santa. I still love the way he wrote the stories here, but the problem is I didn't get the chemistry between the narrator and Connor. Probably because they were gay and I am honestly new in this genre. :"

[REVIEW] The Chaos of Stars

My parents brought me into the world to die. They didn't love me enough to keep me forever—they didn't even pretend like they did. My entire childhood of warmth and love was drawing in the sand—impermanent and fragile and gone in the breath of wind. 

Just like me.

Title: The Chaos of Stars

Author: Kiersten White

Publisher: HarperTeen

Publishing Year: 2013

Number of Pages: 304

ISBN: 978-006-2135-88-9

I rate it 4/5 stars

Isadora was a daughter of Isis—Goddess of Motherhood, Magic, and Fertility— and Osiris—God of the Underworld and Afterlife—, but she was no goddess like her mother other than a normal teenage girl who trapped in Egypt inside her family's temple, as she has always been. Knowing that she was mortal unlike her parents, she started to think that she was born just to worship her parents so that they remained in their immortality. And the thought of that made her hate her parents to the point she wanted to runaway from them forever.

Her wish suddenly became so possible when her mother who always took bad dream as a reminder, decided to send Isadora away from Egypt. For the good of Isadora, she said. Isadora then lived with her brother, Sirus, in San Diego, where she thought things would turn out just right as she expected them to be.

But Isadora's wrong. Not only because Sirus turned out to be silently married and that his wife was pregnant, but also the job thing in the museum her mother told her to do through Sirus couldn't do her sickness for ancient mythology thing she tried to escape. Her expected free-life-from-her mother's-hand was faraway from her grips. Things couldn't get more complicated when suddenly an intruder tried to stole something that connected to her family. And that her fear of falling in love into a guy named Ry with his crystal blue eyes added the stress of her new life in San Diego.