Bleeding Violet

By: Dia Reeves

Narrated by: Suzy Jackson

Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins

Publisher's summary

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 stuffed 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.

©2010 Dia Reeves (P)2010 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"With plenty of sex and violence, this is a book for mature teens, who will find Portero to be an intriguing world and biracial Hanna a startlingly unusual heroine with a poignant, memorable voice." (Booklist)

LOVE!!!

What made the experience of listening to Bleeding Violet the most enjoyable?

It looks like a typical teen book but almost completely blew my mind by how good it was right away.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I was completely obsessed with it right from the beginning.

Didn't like it. Sorry, not sorry

I went into this book with such high expectations and had gotten nothing but disappointment in return. I HATED the main character, not for the reasons I've heard many others did tho. The character was such an author's pet and that hinders any story in my opinion when the author loves their main character too much. I say this mostly because I hated how she basically went around acting on every impulse she had and was such a karma Houdini for it. If anything, things seemed to work out better for her because of her lack of impulse control. The character's personality didn't win me over either. She was too much of a caricature for me to believe she would ever be a tolerable real person. What was the point of making her mentally ill? Mind you, the mental illness she had wasn't one I've ever heard of (I mean she hallucinates and smacks people over the head when she gets mad. What illness is that?). It just didn't seem to serve whatever the plot of this was.

As for the fantasy setting, I had respect for the originality of it but most of it just came off as surrealist randomness and I wish it was better integrated into the story and overall plot. Speaking of plot, where was it? If the overall goal was to build up to the main character's mother getting an exorcism, than the ball was definitely dropped because leading up to that there was no direction in this story. What I got from the plot was that it was about some girl who seems to have some fictionalized mental illness dropping in on her horrible mother, disrupting every person's she interacts with life, and somehow surviving living in this horrifying town when I feel like in reality she would've been killed in less than two days.