Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves

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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Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art

Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Oh yeah, the White Collar writers totally read this and went “yeah, let’s do that! Only sexier and without the mental illness.”



It’s a compelling story of con artistry and, glancingly, of the art world where “real” doesn’t mean nearly as much as everyone says it does. But mostly I was too distracted by the style. This is what happens when a particular breed of reporters write nonfiction, every single time, I swear. They are so focused on hiding the ball, on digesting all of their research into appropriately textured lumps for mass consumption, that they end up producing something that reads more like a novel. I don’t know where they got a single bit of this information. Not specifically, I mean – I have a vague idea who they interviewed and what they read, but they really don’t want me to know where they got what, or how reliable any given piece of information was, or really that any interviewing or information-gathering happened at all. They want me to swallow this down whole with no analysis from me, thank you very much.



I might appreciate that on a Monday morning in the WSJ, but I really don’t in my nonfiction books.





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