Friday, April 30, 2010

Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves

BLEEDING VIOLET

Written by: Dia Reeves
Publication date: January 5, 2010
Released in Hardcover

5 stars


Synopsis: 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.

How I Came to Read This: I just saw this in the store and when I read the inside jacket, I knew it was going to be a good one!

My Review: As soon as I started reading this book, I knew I wasn't going to put it down until the end.

Hanna, main character, narrator, manic-depressive and optimist, is by far one of my favorite female heroines. She's very funny and completely out of her mind. She's not the kind of crazy where it's written all over her face; she's that subtle, sneak-up-on-you kind of crazy. You could know her for several weeks before you start to realize a few screws might be missing. She's learned to live with her disorder, embrace it really, which is why I think she's always looking on the bright side of things. If not for the silver lining, she would sink into her disorder and never have a chance at a real life. However, when you live in a town like Portero, TX, a little thing like insanity is a walk in the park. Nobody can even tell there's anything wrong with her! I love how Hanna handles herself. She never loses her cool when confronted with a tough decision, not even when faced with life or death. She truly is bad ass!

In the beginning, Wyatt was kind of a jerk. He was wishy-washy. You couldn't tell where his loyalty was. But later in the story, I started to really like him. He's definitely a hardcore Mortmaine, but I felt that Hanna upstaged him throughout the book. Whenever he was around, he held my attention and I cared what he said, that is until Hanna said or did something. Don't get me wrong, the story couldn't hold up without him, he was definitely necessary. He was as thoughtful, caring and loving as his duty allowed him to be; as much as the Mortmaine allowed him to be. Another tortured soul, but with a very different spin.

The way Hanna is so casual, so nonchalant about things that would otherwise require a little more tact, it really fits my vision of her. You can't ever forget that Hanna, essentially, is crazy. If you forget that important fact, it could potentially ruin the story. But Dia Reeves wrote this story so well, I don't think anything could ruin it.

The flow of the story is so smooth. There's just enough descriptive detail to keep me from getting lost. I hate when a book has so much detail, the story is what ends up getting lost. Reeves maintains a perfect balance between description and story.

I love in this story, how everybody is so accepting of each others weirdness. I mean, they all live in Crazy Town, USA anyway, so really what's the big deal?? Still, it's nice to read a book that skips over the long process of acceptance and denial by one of the main characters. In this case, everyone's like, "Oh, you're crazy? Cool." Now we can get straight to all the good stuff. And Bleeding Violet is just full of good stuff!

The ending wasn't spectacular - but the reality is that, when you fall in love with a book, you don't want it to end, so no ending will ever really be satisfactory. I did get closure, as much as it could give me.

The only disappointing part of this book was that it had to end at all! There were no slow parts, no lulls, nothing I would change!

Who Should Read This: EVERYONE!!!!!! You're the crazy one if you skip it!

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