Mar 4, 2012

Bleeding Violet, by Dia Reeves

Title: Bleeding Violet
Author: Dia Reeves
Target Audience: Young Adult
Pages: 454
Chapters: 36
Rating: 5/10
Genre: Fantasy / Romance
Person: First
Tense: Past

Blurb (quoted):
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 tried 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.

My Summary:
Hanna is nowhere near what you would term normal. Hallucinations, pills – and purple, everywhere. When she gets sick of her aunt checking her into the mental wards every few weeks, she escapes and makes her way to Portero, Texas, to find her birth mother.
But things aren’t much better here. Her mother doesn’t seem to want her and she’s an outcast in a school of secretive students all in black.
But with a romance brewing as Hanna discovers the town has secrets crazier than her, Hanna may just find she fits in better than she thinks.

Judgement:
Without thinking about it, I would say I enjoyed reading this book – but with a second thought? I really don’t know.
It’s incredibly disturbing in a sense and…. Well, somewhat psychotic – which I suppose is the point of a crazy main character, but it has such a… careless attitude towards murder which doesn’t sit well with society.
Also, it’s quite confusing – towards the end (now I have to try not to give anything away here), it hints that Hanna isn’t crazy at all because one of her hallucinations becomes tangible and affects other people for real…
I’ve read a few other responses to the book and discovered a mass of people gave up before the end out of confusion or irritation. I can totally understand this, but the book still keeps you page-turning.
It was “sort of fun” to read, and kept you page-turning, wondering what was going on or what would come next – but then it also is a scramble of events and ideas. It’s just a mess of scenes and half of them don’t even make sense… I would say there isn’t any structure to this book – maybe that’s the best way to put it.
And then I can’t help but want to say that it was a good read, which just confuses me. I can’t make up my mind about this book to be honest.
In conclusion, if you are a “surface reader” (only interested in words and storyline) you’ll probably enjoy this book, but if your analyse sequence, sense, messages, etc. and really look into it then you might want to steer clear.
I’d say read it yourself and make your own opinion.

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