Bleeding Violet

VOYA - Victoria Vogel

An original plot, a unique protagonist, and plenty of weirdness makes Reeves's first novel a satisfying read for older teens. Hannah Jarvinen is a beautiful, biracial teen looking for someone to love her. She speaks the Finnish language and cooks Finnish cuisine. She wears only purple to honor her dead father, whose ghost speaks to her. She is strong-minded, wild, lonely, and very troubled. She is also bipolar and suffers from hallucinations and fits of violent mania. When her aunt tries to put her in a mental institution, she takes a rolling pin and travels to Portero, Texas, to find her mother. In addition to her mother, she finds a town of black-clad people living in fear of strange monsters called "lures," and a group of monster hunters known as the Mortmaine. Portero contains doors to a dark world that can be opened with "keys" fashioned from bones. Being used to the strange, Hannah is not scared off, and instead becomes determined to prove to her mother that she can be accepted in a town where outsiders are called "transies" (or transients). She falls in lust with popular Wyatt, a Mortmaine. When she helps him to defeat five of the lures, she is hailed as a hero in the town and is compelled to learn more. She becomes Wyatt's lover, and soon she is by his side hunting demons. Her relationship with her mysterious mother, however, does not come as easily. She soon realizes that her mother has her own strange dark connections to Portero and the Mortmaine. This teen novel is not for the faint of heart. There is plenty of blood, gore, violence, sex, and bad decisions. The main character would make many parents cringe. Teens who crave all those things and a dose of the dark arts will love this novel. Although Hannah is not a character to emulate, she is interesting. The plot can be a bit confusing at times, and some situations just do not make sense. For instance, Hannah suffers no consequences for violently assaulting her aunt. Nevertheless it is a fantasy, so some suspension of disbelief is required when reading this interesting debut from an author to watch. Reviewer: Victoria Vogel

Publishers Weekly

In Reeves's dark and stylish first novel, 16-year-old Hanna arrives in the Texas town of Portero seeking Rosalee, the mother she's never known, and fleeing her aunt, who wants her back in a mental institution (Hanna is manic-depressive and has conversations with her deceased father). But Hanna soon learns that Portero has doors to other worlds, allowing ghoulish creatures such as “lures,” who can turn people to glass, to wreak havoc. A group called the Mortmaine keeps the population safe, and when Hanna helps a member named Wyatt defeat the lures, she finally earns acceptance in the unfriendly town. Hanna's sassy voice reflects her freewheeling, unstable personality (“back in Dallas, I decided to sleep with all the boys in my class in alphabetical order”). Even as Rosalee slowly warms to her daughter, walls remain, at one point driving Hanna to attempt suicide. Reeves writes surely and with flair, though readers should be prepared for gore (Hanna slices flesh from Wyatt's father's leg to defeat a demon) and other disturbing moments, as when a naked Hanna and Rosalee torture a boy. Not for the faint of heart. Ages 14–up. (Jan.)

School Library Journal

Gr 8 Up—Hanna Jarvinen, 16, is biracial, bicultural, and bipolar. She makes her own clothes, all of which are purple. After the death of her Finnish father, Hanna goes to Portero, TX, to reunite with her unsuspecting and unwelcoming mother, Rosalee. Demons, spirits, and monsters of every variety populate the town. The ghost of Hanna's father haunts her even when she takes her meds. She takes up with Wyatt, one of Portero's designated monster hunters, to free her mother of a notorious evil spirit. The town lore is jumbled and confusing, and the vast and gruesome variety of ghouls seems completely random. Everything in Bleeding Violet is overwrought. Hanna describes her sexual encounters in bodice-ripping detail, yet she and Wyatt have zero chemistry. Their paranormal interactions are nonsensically gross instead of legitimately scary. Hanna and Rosalee's conversations are an odd combination of wooden exposition and shrieking melodrama. The gross-outs come fast and often, but fail to move the story along. Rosalee's possession, in the last third of the book, seems like a cheap device to resolve an otherwise aimless plot. Hanna's wacky quirks may irritate teens, and though earnest and occasionally witty, she never engages readers.—Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library

Kirkus Reviews

Portero, Texas, is so terrifying that out-of-towners flee in terror. Wonderful new heroine Hanna Jarvinen, however, is hard to spook. She makes friends easily: Black and Finnish, she's comfortable standing out. Moreover, the lifesuckers and cacklers of Portero aren't that freaky to a bipolar girl with hallucinations of her own. After all, Hanna fled here, to her estranged mother, after nearly killing her aunt in a mania-fueled attack. Chopping her way out of the guts of a giant scorpion-thing won't faze her. Sure, it's disconcerting that her pre-Portero delusions have solidified into genuine ghosts, and her new boyfriend fights demons for a living, but Hanna will do whatever it takes to win her mother's love. Hanna's manic depression is integral to her adventure, with her swings alternately harming and helping her in magical battles. Nonetheless, her story is the opposite of a Problem Novel. Neither Hanna nor readers will learn any life lessons about mental illness. This fast-paced (almost manic) page-turner about defeating evil and finding love respects its richly drawn characters too much for easy didacticism. Captivating. (Fantasy. 14 & up)

From the Publisher

Poor Hanna has had a seriously rough adolescence. It’s hard enough for her to accept the death of her beloved father and to manage her escalating mental illness, but when she shows up in the hometown of her mother (whom she’s never met), she discovers that her mother wants nothing to do with her. What’s more, the town itself has doors that open between worlds, often releasing evil forces onto the residents. Since Hanna has nowhere else to go, her mother agrees to let her stay, if she can prove that she can fit into this guarded, hostile town that considers outsiders merely fresh meat for monsters. Reeves immediately establishes a mysterious, disorienting perspective by allowing Hanna (who hallucinates conversations with her father but, as far as the reader is permitted to know, can also conjure up a swan whose actions impact the actual world) to be the only narrative voice describing the town of Portero and Hanna’s efforts to settle into it. The resulting novel is wonderfully baffling, and as lush, warm, and conflicted as Hanna herself. Hanna is a ref reshingly unbalanced protagonist—unafraid of gore or her own sexual power while also being terrified of any loss and unable to handle simple high-school power negotiations. Her struggles are wrenchingly genuine and often even life-threatening (both against horrors released through the portals and the unrelenting clamor and chaos lurking in her own brain chemistry), and readers will likely literally sigh with relief when Hanna finally captures a bit of good to balance her world. — BULLETIN, March, 1, 2010, STAR

An original plot, a unique protagonist, and plenty of weirdness makes Reeve's first novel a satisfying read for older teens. Hannah Jarvinen is a beautiful, birarcial teen looking for someone to love her. She speaks the Finnish language and cooks Finnish cuisine. She wears only purple to honor her dead father, whose ghost speaks to her. She is strong-minded, wild, lonely, and very troubled. She is also bipolar and suffers from halluncinations and fits of violet mania. When her aunt tries to put her in a mental institution, she takes a rolling pin and travels to Portero, Texas, to find her mother. In addition to her mother, she finds a town of black-clad people living in fear of strange monsters called "lures" and a group of monster hunters known as the Mortmaine. Portero contains doors to a dark world that can be opened with "keys" fashioned from bones. Being used to the strange, Hannah is not scared off, and instead becomes determined to prove to her mother that she can be accepted in a town where outsiders are called "transies" (or transients). She falls in lust with popular Wyatt, or Mortmaine. When she helps him to defeat five of the lures, she is hailed as a hero in the town and is compelled to learn more. She becomes Wyatt's lover, and soon she is by his side hunting demons. Her relationship with her mysterious mother, however, does not come as easily. She soon realizes that her mother has her own strange dark connections to Portero and the Mortmaine.

This teen novel is not for the faint of heart. There is plenty of blood, gore, violence, sex and bad decisions. The main character would make many parents cringe. Teens who crave all those things and a dose of the dark arts will love this novel. Although Hannah is not a character to emulate, she is interesting. The plot can be a bit confusing at times, and some situations just do not make sense. For instance, Hannah suffers no consequences for violently assaulting her aunt. Nevertheless it is a fantasy, so some suspension of disbelief is required when reading this interesting debut from an author to watch.

——VOYA April 2010