According to Jane Satterfield, "Elizabeth Hazen's unflinching first book, Chaos Theories, forms a powerful meditation on female identity and the cultural expectations that daughters, mothers, wives, and sisters resist and embrace. For Hazen, fate - familial or biological - is a form of magnificant havoc that reflects both the natural world's lush beauty and the realities of science. A debut fluent in the language of desire, heartbreak and regeneration."