Bleeding Violet

Who: Dia Reeves
What: Bleeding Violet
Where: Simon and Schuster (Simon Pulse)
When: January 5th, 2010
Why: Hype
How: Bought

Love can be a dangerous thing....

Hanna
simply wants to be loved. With a head plagued by hallucinations, a medicine
cabinet full of pills, and a closet stuffed with frilly, violet dresses, Hanna's
tired of being the outcast, the weird girl, the freak. So she runs away to
Portero, Texas in search of a new home.

But Portero is a stranger town
than Hanna expects. As she tries to make a place for herself, she discovers dark
secrets that would terrify any normal soul. Good thing for Hanna, she's far from
normal. As this crazy girl meets an even crazier town, only two things are
certain: Anything can happen and no one is safe.

What a wonderfully twisted book this was! Dia weaves together a city full of hidden doors and evil spirits together with a mentally unstable (manic-depressive) girl named Violet perfectly that I just could not stop reading!

I think the best thing about this was the fact that Hannah isn't a likeable character. She's insane, she's rash, and her thinking is totally screwed up. But Dia makes it work so that I was rooting for Hanna and her insane ways. Bleeding Violet was at times dark and scary, while at others, touching and sweet! The town of Portero was an interesting one, and I loved getting another look at it since I read Slice of Cherry before this one! The fact of a strange town where everything weird happens, so a relief from those Southern Town stories where nothing happens until That happens. Sure, this is an odd book, but I mean that in the best possible way!

There is a romantic plot in Bleeding Violet and I found the relationship between Wyatt and Hanna intriguing and sweet. I also loved her attachment to her mother, since she had never seen her before. If her mother loved her (and her mother was seriously twisted as well), she thought everything was gonna turn out alright. Even if she had to do bad things to win her mother's favor.

All in all, this is an amazing debut from a great author Dia Reeves, whose books are whimsical, and insane, but she works it! This really is a hit or miss book, you either LOVE it or you're going "WTF?"

My rating: AWESOMESAUCE

Happy Reading!
-Harmony B.