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.

Persistence of Memory, by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

Title: Persistence of Memory

Author: Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

Target Audience: Young Adult

Pages: 356

Rating: 6.7/10

Genre: Adventure

Person: Third

Tense: Past

Blurb (quoted):

(None)

Summary:

Erin Misrahe isn’t your average sixteen year-old high school student. Having spent most of her life checking in and out of mental institutions, she is in constant fear that her violent alter-ego, Shevaun, will pay her body a visit after almost two years of being symptom-free.

But as it turns out, Erin isn’t the only one with a wacky story – she soon discovers that not only is her new best friend Marissa, and best-friend-from-the-institution Sassy, are shapeshifters – and that maybe Shevaun doesn’t exist only inside her schizophrenic mind, but is actually a vampire who is none too happy to have a human attached to her mind.

Now her life is more of a mess than ever and Erin finds she doesn’t know who to trust – only that whoever she believes, it shouldn’t be herself.

Join Erin in a topsy turvey word of secrets and lies that is no place for a girl who doesn’t know what’s real from what’s not.

Judgement:

The first thing I have to say about this book, is that this was the second or third time I’ve read it – I say this because, I think it just goes to show how good it is, to have me coming back over and over.

Secondly, I think it’s very original – and I know I’ve been saying that in a lot of reviews, but I’ve honestly never read or heard of anything remotely similar to this one.

It’s multi-POV, which means it has parts written from the point of view of a range of characters; I thought this was effective for the plot because it meant the reader was able to have a lot more information that some of the characters, which meant I wasn’t in the dark about half the things that were going on and I had most of the puzzle pieces.

It has interesting ideas, like different clans for different types of shapeshifters, and it also has this sort of idea of… imprinting on the mind – and I know that I probably made no sense just now, but I have no idea how else to explain it without extreme spoilers.

I liked the characters in this novel; the main characters all had severely different personalities which made conflict as well as spiking interest. They were somewhat developed, though there were holes in a few of their personalities but the great thing is that with the writing style and the way it was done made it so you just didn’t need or even think about the extra information – you only had what was vital to the story, which I suppose can be both bad and good in different ways.

I do however think that it… average. The original ideas weren’t really enough to make it WOW and even though it did hold my attention and put me in the moment, it just doesn’t stand-above-the-rest, it doesn’t stick in your mind like a sore thumb, and it didn’t get my heart racing.

Even so, it was an entertaining read, and good to curl up with on the weekend.

I also found the length was just right; it didn’t drag on, and it’s good for those who like a long read or just a short one – it slips right in the middle.