Book Review: Bleeding Violet - Dia Reeves

Love... can be a dangerous thing.
Hanna simply wants to be loved. With a head plagued by hallucinations, a medicine cabinet full of pills, and a closet filled with frilly violet dresses, Hanna's tired of being the outcast, the weird girl, the freak. So she runs away to Portero, Texas, in search of a new home.
But Portero is a stranger town than Hanna expects. As she tries to make a place for herself, she discovers dark secrets that would terrify any normal soul. Good thing for Hanna, she's far from normal. As this crazy girl meets an even crazier town, only two things are certain: Anything can happen and no one is safe. - From the back of the book.

Bleeding Violet is amazing. It is so different from anything I have ever read before, and I couldn't put it down. It took me just over a day to read. The writing style is easy to read and interesting, and the characters are real and believable. The story is crazy, and shouldn't make sense, but somehow, in some weird, twisted way, it does.

The most amazing thing about this book is not the story itself, but the setting and the characters. Dia Reeves takes care to explain everything just right, but not go into so much detail that it's boring, but going into just enough so that you know what's going on without having to read hundreds of pages of mindless description.

First of all, the characters. They seem so real, so believable, even in the most surreal and unbelievable situations. Invisible doors, leeches with tentacles, and ghosts living in rivers that grant wishes, (but only if you can breathe underwater for as long as it takes for the wish to be made, of course). They react to these weird twists and turns like any normal crazy person would, and everything about the book is just so realistic.

Another thing about the characters is, that if the weird and wonderful things were stripped away, it would still make sense, and be good. Everything that happens is due to what a character is doing or feeling, their actions and emotions affecting their behaviour. As the book is told by Hanna, she is the main driving force, with all her emotions that she keeps bottled up inside, and how she's coping with her bipolar disorder etc, but still, the other characters are very important, and stand out to me, and can be remembered.

There is so much going on in this book, that it's difficult to know what exactly is happening. There is so much in it: sadness, happiness, death, power, acceptance, trying to fit in and be normal in a world where normal doesn't exist, living with bipolar disorder, there is so much to it, that it makes it unique, memorable and just a truly amazing story, one that I cannot recommend enough.

I give it 5 Feet!