Bleeding Violet

This month I'm reviewing a book I read much earlier in the year, but here it is November and this book is still with me.  Its vivid images are still swimming in my head, more so than the book I'm reading right now or any book I can recall in recent memory.

Meet BLEEDING VIOLET by Dia Reeves.  This is not your mother's paranormal.  It's a story about a crazy girl who moves in with her estranged mother in an even crazier town.  Meet Portero, a town where monsters roam free, and random doorways lead to horrors untold.  Yes, I did say meet the town.  Because the town is as much a character in BLEEDING VIOLET as the characters who populate it.  This is a great example of a book where the setting not only matters, but is so much a part story that it becomes a living, breathing thing.  And a scary, exciting, horrifying thing it is.

Hanna is dealing with her own mental illness and hallucinations, her feelings of abandonment and her struggles with self-identity (Hanna is bi-racial, bi-cultural and manic-depressive). After her father's death, she takes to only wearing violet and comes to live with her mother in Portero, Texas.  Everyone in Portero wears black and grey, because in a town where monsters roam free, it's not good to stand out.  Hanna does stand out with her violet clothes, mixed race and mental illness, but she isn't the type to hide in shadows and sees no need to hide from them.  Neither does her love interest Wyatt, who wears bright green, to lure the monsters out of hiding so he can hunt them.  I loved this wonderful use of color, and the scene where Wyatt enters this grey world decked from head to toe in green is one that continues to haunt me (in a really good way).
And are there monsters!  Gory, scary, creepy monsters abound.  But the most dangerous monsters in BLEEDING VIOLET are the ones that lurk in the human heart.  The scariest folks in Portero are the human inhabitants.  And in Hanna's case, the monster that she must find a way to defeat is much, much closer to home.  

Have you read it yet?  Do!  It's a fast paced, fun read on the dark side of fantasy.  Then you can wait with me for Dia's follow up, SLICE OF CHERRY, another Portero novel featuring a pair of sisters who are serial killers. 


Check out the first chapter of SLICE OF CHERRY here

1 comments

Ok wow! Now I feel really ashamed of how long this book has been sitting on my shelves waiting to be read. Well my ARC of it anyway. This book sounds so deliciously creepy and I loved what you said about the scariest ones being the humans of the town. Really grabs my attention. Can't wait to knock out my review books so I can get to this one. Thanks for the great review! :D

~Briana

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