Bleeding Violet - Dia Reeves
Bleeding Violet, by Dia Reeves
Blurb:
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.
Review:
Hanna Järvinen is a biracial bipolar teenager who only wears purple. Having whacked her Aunt Ulla on the head with a rolling pin, she escapes to Portero, Texas, to find her mother, whom she's never met. Portero (French porte = door) happens to be a town full of doors to other worlds, and equally full of random monsters that come through them, which are dealt with by the Mortmaine, a town organisation of monster hunters. Rosalee, Hanna's mother, agrees to let Hanna stay if she can fit in in 2 weeks. Hanna meets a cute boy in the Mortmaine named Wyatt, encounters menaces in the school, & deals with various other menaces including a threat to her mother.
The appeal of the book is Hanna's narration. She definitely goes up and down, at one point literally painting the walls with her blood. Her most frequent hallucinations seem to come to life in Portero. Her wooden swan comes to life whenever she tries to commit suicide and prevents her, and the ghost of her father starts knowing things she doesn't know instead of just being a confidant. Hanna deals with all this as a matter of course, which gives her a great advantage over other outsiders in Portero, & her ups give her the confidence to defeat evil monsters. Hanna is very happily insane, and her intense emotions are very human. They make you love her just as anyone loves someone who feels so intensely. It's refreshing to meet someone who believes in what she sees and believes in herself, even though she is very down sometimes.
One reader on amazon objected to violence in the book. It's true there is a lot of violence, & it's not vividly described; it's almost like kid violence. I would counter that killing monsters is the Mortmaine's daily job; Rosalee only commits murder while possessed by an evil spirit, & when it comes down to an ethical choice, Wyatt makes a very hard decision. He is not portrayed as a reckless killer. The book is walking a fine line between being too grim for children and between encouraging random violence. It has to show violent events & consequences, without everything being knee deep in grit & angst, as some books I like are. It's also possible that teens are less prone to complicated ethical dilemmas in circumstances with clear villains.
This is technically not as good a book as some of the other books I've been reading lately, but what I really like it for its positive portrayal of a clearly insane person. Like Stark in Farscape, Hanna is a hero and a contributor to the team of heroes, & unlike Stark she is the book's main heroine. Her familiarity with thinking differently helps her in many circumstances where a normal person would despair or not be able to think of an answer. She's a positive role model for the emotionally afflicted. And her family is a realistic dysfunctional family with humans actually trying to be better than they are. It doesn't have a sugar-coated family.