Bleeding Violet (book) by Dia Reeves

There's no cover image because the ILL copy of this book that I got had no book jacket, just a plain black cardboard cover.

Synopsis:

Hanna is bipolar (or, as she prefers to call it, manic-depressive) and sometimes has hallucinations, particularly when she doesn't take her meds. After her father died, she went to live with her aunt. When her aunt decides she needs to be sent to a psych ward, Hanna hits her over the head and runs off to find her mother, who lives in Portero, TX.

Rosalee, Hanna's mother, is not a motherly person. She'd rather Hanna wasn't even near her at all. Eventually, Hanna convinces her to give her a probationary period: if, in a week, Hanna can adapt to life in Portero, fit in, make friends, survive, etc., she can stay. If not, she has to leave.

Hanna is determined to stay, but it's not going to be easy to win the bet she made with her mother. There are lots of ways she doesn't fit in - although it used to be that the biggest thing that set her apart from others (other than her bipolar disorder, although I'm not sure if that developed before or after her father's death) was her mother being black and her father a white Finnish guy, in Portero she's even more different. Everyone calls Hanna a transy (short for "transient") and no one expects her to live long so no one makes an effort to care about her.

Eventually Hanna starts to realize that the weird things she's seeing in Portero aren't just her usual hallucinations - Portero really is crawling with danger, monsters, and general weirdness. In her quest to fit in and win her mother's approval, Hanna makes friends, starts dating and sleeping with a badass Porterene named Wyatt, and kills some monsters. Things start to fall apart, however, when Hanna realizes that something is very wrong with her mother. Afraid that the Mortmaines, Portero's ruthless protectors (of which Wyatt is one), will kill Rosalee, Hanna tries to figure out a way to save her on her own. In the process of doing this, Hanna learns just how far she'll go to protect the people she cares about and figures out how to do things that no one, not even Porterenes, thought was possible.

Commentary:

I've done things a little backwards. Although this is the first of Reeves' Portero books (and her first YA book), I read Slice of Cherry, the second book in the series, first. I don't think this ruined much for me. I probably would have figured out Portero's weirdness wasn't just in Hanna's head fairly quickly on my own, and I liked knowing that Wyatt and Hanna were still together in the next book, because it meant that Bleeding Violet's ending had to be at least a little happy.

While Bleeding Violet didn't resonate with me on as personal a level as Slice of Cherry did, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I found it to be a much more comfortable read. While I might hesitate to recommend Slice of Cherry to someone, I think Bleeding Violet is much more likely to appeal to a broader audience. Although Hanna may be prone to violent behavior, she doesn't set out to kill anyone on purpose - that automatically gives her a few points over Fancy. The Mortmaine tendency towards ruthlessness bothers her, and, although she does terrible things out of a desire to help her mother, her goal is understandable and she doesn't necessarily feel good about the things she does.

Slice of Cherry (book) by Dia Reeves

Synopsis:

Fancy and Kit are two sisters whose father was arrested and put on death row for torturing and killing people in the basement of their home. Now their mother, Madda, works long hours to support the family, and Fancy and Kit are trying to make sure she never finds out that they're on their way to following in their father's footsteps. At the beginning of the book, a young man sneaks into their home, intending to steal some "Bonesaw Killer" souvenirs he can sell on Ebay. Kit stabs him and intends to kill him. Fancy talks her into merely keeping him locked up in the basement and cutting him up every once in a while. It's not that Fancy lacks a desire to kill - she has the same urges as her sister. No, Fancy is just terrified that her sister will be caught the way their father was caught. That's pretty much the only reason she does her best to make sure the guy doesn't die, and even stitches up his wounds whenever Kit is done with him.

Eventually, the guy, who is now so covered in sutured wounds that the girls have named him Franken (short for "Frankenstein"), develops a Stockholm syndrome-inspired attachment to Kit. Fancy wouldn't be so bothered by this if it weren't evident that Kit has grown to like Franken in return (which does not, by the way, stop her from cutting him up and asking if she can kill him). Even worse, Kit begins showing an interest in a boy named Gabriel, one of the sons of Kit and Fancy's father's last victims. The interest is mutual, and Gabriel's older brother, Ilan, seems equally interested in Fancy, much to Fancy's horror.

Fancy wants nothing more than for what's left of her family to stay together. She decides that the only way this is possible is if she can find a way for her and Kit to kill without any risk of being caught - then Madda would never find out their secret, no one would ever be able to send them to jail, and Kit would be able to kill to her heart's content and lose her newly-developed interest in Gabriel.

When Fancy gets her wish, everything seems perfect, at first. What Fancy is slow to realize, however, is that change is part of growing up. As Kit's world broadens to include more people than just her sister and Madda, Fancy worries that she will be left behind.

Commentary:

I read this book quite a while ago but delayed writing about it. Part of the reason for this is the discomfort I felt with how much I ended up identifying with Fancy. Even though it was Fancy's relationship with her sister that I identified with rather than her urges to kill (thank goodness, right?), it's still not a comfortable thing to see a part of yourself in a character who's a serial killer.