Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves

[lightreads]

Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I had to wait a while to review this, because otherwise I would have snarled my way through a glowing review powered on my sheer fucking outrage over the crap people say about this book. Did you guys know that sixteen-year-old girls who are confident and sexually active are sluts? Oh, and people with mental illness should not be the protagonists of young adult fiction because it’s “upsetting”? That’s right, being exposed to people with disabilities is really unpleasant, and it shouldn’t happen to unsuspecting normals, particularly those delicate young impressionable ones!



…Hang on, where have I heard this before? It’s on the tip of my tongue… Oh! Right! I remember now!



*pants*



So, um, the actual book. Okay. Some of you who consider yourselves outsiders looking into the fantasy genre will really dig this one. It’s this twisty, hallucinatory fantasy-horror about a teenaged girl with Bipolar Disorder moving to a town full of doors, and all the things that come through those doors. It’s about how her bendy, elastic mind clicks right into this place, and how all the splashy horror set pieces have that psychologically dense feeling you get from good horror, where the creepy floaty tentacle monster is an outgrowth of the emotional arc as much as the plot arc. Hmm. I think I could compress all of that into the word “visceral,” and mean the same thing. This book felt like an ocean surface to me, with that intense awareness of sharks moving invisibly underneath.



Anyway, it’s cool, and weird, and disturbing, and hypnotic. And it’s about a sexually active bi-racial teenaged girl with a mental illness and it’s not stupid about any of that. But I think my mind is too orderly, my desire for internal fantasy rules too strong, because I didn’t love it. So I’m not raving about it, even though I was tempted to as a generalized fuck you to a few people out there.



But some of you guys? You will totally dig this.





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Comments

[jadelennox]

Yah, I can see this. I think the Portero books are incredible, but they're also a mess. That works with their protagonists; as you say, the horror is so psychologically dense, and so the fucked up heroines are reflected in a fucked up world. But orderly it ain't.

[jadelennox]

My god I just started looking at the Goodreads reviews -- because the professional reviews are mixed but mostly they don't do that ableist Crap -- and some of them are obscene. I understand the powered by rage thing now.

[lightreads]

Yeah I got stuck in this rage loop where I looked at Goodreads, then other sites, and even Amazon, I was just so horrified.

[buymeaclue]

I flippin' _loved_ this one.

[lightreads]

See, I knew I knew people with *gestures* the right kind of brain.

Have you read Slice of Cherry, and did you love it in the same way?

[buymeaclue]

I liked but did not love it. Found an old comment to refresh my memory and it went like this:

<>I'm about halfway through Slice of Cherry. They live adjacent to Portero, but there are very decidedly supernatural elements, very much of a piece. Thus far, it's rather more over-the-top with the violence, but in ways (the violence itself and the reactions to same) that are feeling less...organic? to me than everything about the first book (which I flippin' loved: http://buymeaclue.livejournal.com/807537.html ). I'm not sure it's that everything feels a little less batshit, or if it's just that everything is equally batshit but in ways that are less well-done or maybe just working less well for me. I am enjoying the read and will definitely finish, but my inner monologue for Bleeding Violet was, "AWESOME SAUCE," and for this book it's more like, "Wait, what?" and, "Um, I think maybe not."

FWIW.


Apparently I need to retire the phrase "flippin' loved."

[ecaterin]

*downloads sample to Kindle.....*