** spoiler alert ** I feel like I should start this review with a caveat: this will not be a positive review.

There's always some danger in panning a highly-buzzed book, particularly one where the financials are so well known (if you haven't seen it all over the internet, or the local news, Starcrossed was sold for seven-figures). Critics—especially critics who are members of the great unpublished masses—risk being labeled "haters" (or, worse, "jealous, bitter failures") for raising complaints with the work in question, as if criticism of a work is intrinsically criticism of the author's success.

And so I'll come right out and say that I wish Josephine Angelini no ill will; she seems like a nice person, and I'm glad her book's sale has been lucrative for her and her husband and helped them to get out of a nasty debt situation. I'm not, in reviewing Starcrossed, insisting that anyone not buy it. I'm not out to ruin any careers.

But I'm an honest person, and my honesty compels me to say this, despite all of the above: Starcrossed is, quite frankly, a mess.

The first problem with this novel, widely touted as "Percy Jackson meets Twilight" is that the prose is painfully amateur. Now, keep in mind that I've worked variously as an editor, a proofreader, a grader of undergraduate essays, and an English instructor; I'm highly attuned to issues with prose stylistics and perhaps am more likely to be rankled by clumsy prose.

And rankled I was by Starcrossed, persistently and pervasively. My issues with the writing are not simply matters of taste. I appreciate all sorts of prose, from the sparse and efficient (see my review of Lauren Strasnick's Nothing Like You) to the florid and poetic (such as Lauren DeStafano's Wither). Starcrossed occupies neither of these quite different stylistic extremes, though Angelini appears to sometimes overreach for Witheresque poetic stylings. She never quite achieves it for the simple reason that she never seems in control of her writing. Among the rookie, Creative-Writing-101 missteps in Starcrossed are:

-A hatred of the unadorned "said." Nearly every instance of dialogue is accompanied by an adverb, if not substituted for an awkward Said Bookism. People huff and hiss and whisper and say things in a rush or softly or sweetly or jokingly. The dialogue itself is largely fine, and would convey meaning adequately if Angelini weren't apparently terrified that it doesn't.

-Repetitive and unnecessarily detailed action descriptors. Every single instance of movement or psychology is painfully described. People get up, move from one end of the room to the other, cross their arms over their chests, sigh, roll their eyes, look this way, look that way. Simple interactions between characters are therefore unnecessarily drawn out, slowing the pace to a deathly near-halt even during the times when the book should be the most riveting.

-An abundance of telling, not showing. Angelini appears not to trust her readers to intuit character emotions through either (overdescribed) actions or (ham-fistedly written) dialogue; we have to be told, as well, what every character thinks. This is exacerbated through the clumsily-executed third-person POV, which is usually quite close to our main character Helen but has a tendency to abruptly jump to other characters for no apparent rhyme or reason other than to reiterate the already-apparent thought processes behind their dialogue.

-A tendency to use overly complex sentence structure which both slows down pacing and needlessly complicates meaning. Rather than vary her sentence structure, Angelini riddles nearly every sentence with dependent clauses and conjunctions. This wouldn't be a crime against prose in-and-of-itself, but used so constantly, it slows the already bogged-down prose even more, causes lapses in clarity, and is sometimes just grammatically incorrect.

All of this is unfortunate, mostly because this sort of problematic prose can be edited quite easily (even if doing so is a time-consuming process); these are issues addressed all over the Internet and in every college creative writing workshop. This kind of prose works against any story, and a book needs to be stellar indeed to overcome it.

Unfortunately, Starcrossed's characters and story are not strong enough to overcome the writing. At first, I hoped it would be—it's got a promising setting (Nantucket) and a fairly interesting premise. Helen Hamilton, raised by her single dad on an isolated New England island, meets a new-comer from a large family and instantly wants to kill him.

The problem is that Angelini has appropriated Greek mythology here in a particularly clumsy way. As executed in Starcrossed, this mythology is beyond convoluted, and Angelini no sooner establishes some mythological detail than to directly contradict it. For example, our main characters are Scions, the descendants of Greek gods, who don't look like their parents but rather have faces recycled from other Scions. Except for one notable exception, who looks just like her mother. Some of these mythological appropriations are just-plain cheesy (the Scions need to kill everyone not descended from the same Greek god so they can raise Atlantis and . . . become immortal?), others are awkwardly inconsistent or cast weird aspersions on mythological characters (the Trojan War happened just like it says in The Iliad, except for the Trojan horse—which, er, wasn't even in The Iliad; rather, Helen just slutted it up so that the Greeks could invade. More on Helen's sluttery in a bit).

But perhaps most troubling, as applied here the bits of prophesy and Greek mythology remove every single instance of organic character conflict in favor of characters being conveniently compelled to do things against their will. Repeatedly, characters will attack others only because they've been prophesized or fated to do so. Characters love one another, likewise, not because they have chemistry or anything in common but because they're caught in some sort of quasi-Buddhist cycle of reincarnation/repetition. They resist one another's advances because terrible things will happen if they get together, not because they actually don't want to sleep with each other, or whatever. And because the mythology is so inconsistently applied, these prophesies and decrees are immediately magically lifted, and everything is rosy again, until the characters are again conveniently fated to do something when the plot demands it.

Angelini's talked again and again about the origin story behind her writing of Starcrossed: she saw Romeo and Juliet sitting beside The Iliad on her bookshelf. The problem with reinvisionings like this one is that they often miss the mark on what made the source material so powerful. Here, she tries to create a blood feud like Romeo and Juliet, but she gets so caught up in making our couple fated and star-crossed that she misses exploring the more dynamic and compelling aspects of Romeo and Juliet's love. Namely, the other doomed pair were raised with the blood feud and were inculcated to hate one another; therefore, their love represents something genuinely transcendent.

But Helen doesn't know anything about this "blood feud" which she is apparently involved in until she meets Lucas. She never really understands the source of it (and no wonder, because it doesn't really make sense) and so the ultimate resolution lacks emotional impact.

There's also a persistent and weird concern here with female sexuality as a weapon. Helen is often criminally underdressed (including, once, in a short, see-through nighty) and is subsequently gawked at by the male characters. She lusts after Lucas, but is repeatedly rebuffed (not because he doesn't want to—of course he "growls" at her that he does—but because of a prophesy. Naturally) and essentially asked to control herself because all sorts of horrid things will happen if they gave in to their natural desires. Though we're told that Lucas's lust is powerful and very, very dangerous, he is able to control himself and hence dictate the terms of their relationship. And this control extends beyond just their sex life; the pair gets into a very scary argument about Helen maybe flirting with other guys, where Helen is told that Lucas is not normally a jealous person but instead just rendered as such because Helen's so beautiful that he can't control himself.

In fact, men here generally have problems controlling themselves around women, and this is always the woman's fault, or, at the very least, the fault of that evil temptress Aphrodite, who is at fault for the Trojan War, for making women like Helen slutty, for making men lose their tempers around women and murder one another, and so on, and so forth.

This even extends to Lucas adorably threatening to kill any man who would "take" Helen's virginity when she proposes to take her sexuality in her own hands. How romantic!

Call me a feminist prude if you want, but I found this all exactly as troubling as the implied sexual violence of Twilight (and if you haven't, you should really read Vinaya's review of Starcrossed, which more thoroughly explores the similarities between the two books), if not more so.

All of this is really a shame. I love Greek mythology and have been eager to read a well-written, thoughtful YA retelling of the Greek myths. Unfortunately, Starcrossed is neither.

A review copy was generously provided by the publisher and NetGalley.