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rachelmanija, whose reasons for not finishing this book got it onto my find-and-read list.
Hm.
I really, really wanted to like this book. There are many things I do like about it. But.
If I had to pick a genre for Bleeding Violet, I suppose it is a teen paranormal, although only technically a romance; but one of the many things I do like about it is that it is so different from anything else I've seen in that direction. If it reminds me of anything it's of Clive Barker.
Sixteen-year-old Hanna arrives on her mother's doorstep unexpectedly in the middle of the night, to find that her mother's small town in East Texas is actually full of randomly opening portals to other dimensions, many of which release monsters and oddities into the town at no apparent provocation. Hanna is biracial, bicultural (her father and extended family on his side were Finnish), bright, promiscuous, socially maladjusted, and mentally ill. She mentions several diagnoses she's been given, but the one that seemed obvious to me is schizophrenia. As a result, the intersection of the dangers of the town with her own interior problems and her attempts to build a relationship with a mother she'd never met quickly produces exponentially multiplying badness, which isn't helped in any way by her acquisition of an apprentice-demon-hunter boyfriend.
Some things I liked: the setup in general. The various monsters and dangers, all of which are original, different, unexpectedly timed, and genuinely dangerous: this is a town in which you can lean casually against a picket fence and have a tentacle punch through it and start sucking blood out of your arm, or in which the swirling red lights that live inside windowpanes can lure you into becoming a glass statue. The fact that Hanna is genuinely promiscuous both because she likes sex and because she uses it for social leverage, and the text never punishes her for it-- any bad consequences are entirely due to her actually being a jerk about it. The willingness of the book to have an amount of gore in it that I do not recall previously seeing in YA. The way that no relationship in the book is easy, no trust is ever absolute, and yet no human being in it can ever be totally written off as unwilling to do the right thing. The way that Hanna has to try to reality-test the things she sees, because even though it's obvious that the freaky stuff is real and the town is really magical, she could still, in individual instances, be hallucinating. The way that the book never, ever falls into the trap of thinking that it is automatically okay for her to be off her meds because things she thought were hallucinations turn out to be real, and so bad things happen when she goes off her meds. The Mayor of the town, who is very spoilery to talk about, but extremely awesome. The demon-hunting clan's attitude, which I can only describe as incredibly Texas from my experience of living here-- their reaction to 'something terrible is in my windowpane' is 'well don't touch the windows anymore and call us when you really have a problem, but when you do we will be there with bells on, as long as you aren't being a wimp about it'.
And some major things I didn't like, which inevitably involves talking about more of the plot than people who would find this interesting might want.
Firstly: why the fuck is this YA? I mean that in the sense that the book, as written, is YA, but should not have been written to be. This would be so much better as an adult novel with a teenage protagonist. It has, as I said, a lot more gore than one usually gets in this genre. What I think it would need, to really work, is a lot more gore than one gets in most books ever. It goes to eleven; it ought to go to twenty. My reasoning for this is that Hanna is, in fact, actually crazy: but the ways that the other people in the town are shown as responding to the place make them functionally more disconnected from outside reality than she is.
Her mother, for instance, is possessed by a malevolent ghost, but is working on time-sharing with it in a way that will get the ghost out of her head without hurting Hanna. Fair enough. But she's willing to go to lengths that include serial killing to achieve that, and this is where I start to balk, because the town is not a mad enough place for that to seem like a thing that could be gotten away with, or that the mother would not be trying to fight against that the way she's fighting against hurting her own daughter. It's almost a bad enough place, it comes very close. It would need to be a place where the value of human life is basically nil for this to be a comprehensible plot thing. It would need to be a place where not only does Hanna look sane by comparison to everything around her (which she does), but in which far less sympathetic things do. It's within shouting distance of that and I think that being YA, being marketed as YA and written with teenagers in mind, is what keeps the book away from there. I think that if the readers were assumed to be adults, this could have gotten nastier, and become genuinely frightening horror.
This needed to be a book in which the reader could share Hanna's reaction when her mother starts killing people; Hanna's reaction is basically 'that makes sense and could work, seems logistically difficult but it's nice to know she loves me', not 'this is screamingly wrong', and if as a reader the first thought through my head was the same as Hanna's, well, that would be actually scary. There are a couple of other plot things which would also benefit from going more Grand Guignol, in the same sort of way.
I do not know why YA seemed the natural niche for this novel, given what it seems to be trying to do. What it seems to be trying to do could make an amazing straight-out horror piece. I wish it had been that.
Secondly: mental illness.
Sigh.
Okay, this book is better about mental illness than about eighty percent of what's out there, especially in fantasy and horror. As I've mentioned, Hanna has genuine issues which cause her genuine problems. It is a Bad Thing when she goes off her meds, her sleep patterns are totally borked, she is living in a place where going hypomanic is incredibly dangerous and nearly gets her killed repeatedly, she attempts suicide on multiple occasions, and the inside of her head is not a pleasant place to be. And she and the book are very clear that this is not a thing about her which entitles other people to treat her badly, in and of itself-- that other people are only entitled to treat her badly if she actually hurts them, not just because they think she's crazy. I approve of that.
But. I would have been a lot happier if more of the things that she reality-tests had turned out to be delusional, since as it is we don't see many instances of the sort of hallucination she says is her worst and most recurring problem, and it becomes obvious very quickly that the things going on in the town are objectively happening. That's minor.
The major thing is that the principal elements of her delusional system all turn out to be validated. She hears her dead father's voice in her head, and sees him, if she's off her meds. It's an open question whether he was really there before she gets to the town, but once she gets there he's obviously real, he gives her information she didn't know and couldn't have otherwise gotten that turns out to be correct. And another major hallucination of hers, a bird that appears to attack and distract her whenever she becomes suicidal, turns out to be real enough to be usable as a weapon, which saves her in the final confrontation.
Nobody else in the town has these powers.
This comes uncomfortably close to She's Not Crazy She Just Has Special Magic She Didn't Know How To Use territory, and goes a very long way towards undermining the actual problems her illness causes her. It also comes uncomfortably close to validating several of the nastier things she does to and for other people and herself as being part of what is necessary for her to unlock her powers. I really hate the trope in fiction where being an artistic genius or a mage or whatever means you have to be crazy and the two go hand in hand and Madness Is The Price Of Brilliance. That is a trope that has fucked up so many real people's lives. And in this book, it obfuscates the thing I was really enjoying, where this is just a part of her and some things she does are okay and some aren't and she is still responsible for both, but it's harder for her than it is for other people to deal with and understand some things and she needs outside help with a lot, and sometimes she triumphs and sometimes she fucks up both because of and in spite of this illness-- in short, it was being a fairly realistic-feeling portrayal, and then it wasn't, and that's always aggravating.
Ah well. I really wanted to like this book. I do like large chunks of it.
And it's a first novel, and it's a really ambitious high-wire act of a first novel, even if I think it falls off. If Reeves keeps being this ambitious, hopefully some day she'll stick it. She has already attained originality, and that can be difficult enough. I need to stop being annoyed at her for not being Gemma Files, because I only run across writers like Gemma Files every once in a blue moon. Reeves could get there eventually and I devoutly hope she does.
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comments over there.
rachelmanija, whose reasons for not finishing this book got it onto my find-and-read list.Hm.
I really, really wanted to like this book. There are many things I do like about it. But.
If I had to pick a genre for Bleeding Violet, I suppose it is a teen paranormal, although only technically a romance; but one of the many things I do like about it is that it is so different from anything else I've seen in that direction. If it reminds me of anything it's of Clive Barker.
Sixteen-year-old Hanna arrives on her mother's doorstep unexpectedly in the middle of the night, to find that her mother's small town in East Texas is actually full of randomly opening portals to other dimensions, many of which release monsters and oddities into the town at no apparent provocation. Hanna is biracial, bicultural (her father and extended family on his side were Finnish), bright, promiscuous, socially maladjusted, and mentally ill. She mentions several diagnoses she's been given, but the one that seemed obvious to me is schizophrenia. As a result, the intersection of the dangers of the town with her own interior problems and her attempts to build a relationship with a mother she'd never met quickly produces exponentially multiplying badness, which isn't helped in any way by her acquisition of an apprentice-demon-hunter boyfriend.
Some things I liked: the setup in general. The various monsters and dangers, all of which are original, different, unexpectedly timed, and genuinely dangerous: this is a town in which you can lean casually against a picket fence and have a tentacle punch through it and start sucking blood out of your arm, or in which the swirling red lights that live inside windowpanes can lure you into becoming a glass statue. The fact that Hanna is genuinely promiscuous both because she likes sex and because she uses it for social leverage, and the text never punishes her for it-- any bad consequences are entirely due to her actually being a jerk about it. The willingness of the book to have an amount of gore in it that I do not recall previously seeing in YA. The way that no relationship in the book is easy, no trust is ever absolute, and yet no human being in it can ever be totally written off as unwilling to do the right thing. The way that Hanna has to try to reality-test the things she sees, because even though it's obvious that the freaky stuff is real and the town is really magical, she could still, in individual instances, be hallucinating. The way that the book never, ever falls into the trap of thinking that it is automatically okay for her to be off her meds because things she thought were hallucinations turn out to be real, and so bad things happen when she goes off her meds. The Mayor of the town, who is very spoilery to talk about, but extremely awesome. The demon-hunting clan's attitude, which I can only describe as incredibly Texas from my experience of living here-- their reaction to 'something terrible is in my windowpane' is 'well don't touch the windows anymore and call us when you really have a problem, but when you do we will be there with bells on, as long as you aren't being a wimp about it'.
And some major things I didn't like, which inevitably involves talking about more of the plot than people who would find this interesting might want.
Firstly: why the fuck is this YA? I mean that in the sense that the book, as written, is YA, but should not have been written to be. This would be so much better as an adult novel with a teenage protagonist. It has, as I said, a lot more gore than one usually gets in this genre. What I think it would need, to really work, is a lot more gore than one gets in most books ever. It goes to eleven; it ought to go to twenty. My reasoning for this is that Hanna is, in fact, actually crazy: but the ways that the other people in the town are shown as responding to the place make them functionally more disconnected from outside reality than she is.
Her mother, for instance, is possessed by a malevolent ghost, but is working on time-sharing with it in a way that will get the ghost out of her head without hurting Hanna. Fair enough. But she's willing to go to lengths that include serial killing to achieve that, and this is where I start to balk, because the town is not a mad enough place for that to seem like a thing that could be gotten away with, or that the mother would not be trying to fight against that the way she's fighting against hurting her own daughter. It's almost a bad enough place, it comes very close. It would need to be a place where the value of human life is basically nil for this to be a comprehensible plot thing. It would need to be a place where not only does Hanna look sane by comparison to everything around her (which she does), but in which far less sympathetic things do. It's within shouting distance of that and I think that being YA, being marketed as YA and written with teenagers in mind, is what keeps the book away from there. I think that if the readers were assumed to be adults, this could have gotten nastier, and become genuinely frightening horror.
This needed to be a book in which the reader could share Hanna's reaction when her mother starts killing people; Hanna's reaction is basically 'that makes sense and could work, seems logistically difficult but it's nice to know she loves me', not 'this is screamingly wrong', and if as a reader the first thought through my head was the same as Hanna's, well, that would be actually scary. There are a couple of other plot things which would also benefit from going more Grand Guignol, in the same sort of way.
I do not know why YA seemed the natural niche for this novel, given what it seems to be trying to do. What it seems to be trying to do could make an amazing straight-out horror piece. I wish it had been that.
Secondly: mental illness.
Sigh.
Okay, this book is better about mental illness than about eighty percent of what's out there, especially in fantasy and horror. As I've mentioned, Hanna has genuine issues which cause her genuine problems. It is a Bad Thing when she goes off her meds, her sleep patterns are totally borked, she is living in a place where going hypomanic is incredibly dangerous and nearly gets her killed repeatedly, she attempts suicide on multiple occasions, and the inside of her head is not a pleasant place to be. And she and the book are very clear that this is not a thing about her which entitles other people to treat her badly, in and of itself-- that other people are only entitled to treat her badly if she actually hurts them, not just because they think she's crazy. I approve of that.
But. I would have been a lot happier if more of the things that she reality-tests had turned out to be delusional, since as it is we don't see many instances of the sort of hallucination she says is her worst and most recurring problem, and it becomes obvious very quickly that the things going on in the town are objectively happening. That's minor.
The major thing is that the principal elements of her delusional system all turn out to be validated. She hears her dead father's voice in her head, and sees him, if she's off her meds. It's an open question whether he was really there before she gets to the town, but once she gets there he's obviously real, he gives her information she didn't know and couldn't have otherwise gotten that turns out to be correct. And another major hallucination of hers, a bird that appears to attack and distract her whenever she becomes suicidal, turns out to be real enough to be usable as a weapon, which saves her in the final confrontation.
Nobody else in the town has these powers.
This comes uncomfortably close to She's Not Crazy She Just Has Special Magic She Didn't Know How To Use territory, and goes a very long way towards undermining the actual problems her illness causes her. It also comes uncomfortably close to validating several of the nastier things she does to and for other people and herself as being part of what is necessary for her to unlock her powers. I really hate the trope in fiction where being an artistic genius or a mage or whatever means you have to be crazy and the two go hand in hand and Madness Is The Price Of Brilliance. That is a trope that has fucked up so many real people's lives. And in this book, it obfuscates the thing I was really enjoying, where this is just a part of her and some things she does are okay and some aren't and she is still responsible for both, but it's harder for her than it is for other people to deal with and understand some things and she needs outside help with a lot, and sometimes she triumphs and sometimes she fucks up both because of and in spite of this illness-- in short, it was being a fairly realistic-feeling portrayal, and then it wasn't, and that's always aggravating.
Ah well. I really wanted to like this book. I do like large chunks of it.
And it's a first novel, and it's a really ambitious high-wire act of a first novel, even if I think it falls off. If Reeves keeps being this ambitious, hopefully some day she'll stick it. She has already attained originality, and that can be difficult enough. I need to stop being annoyed at her for not being Gemma Files, because I only run across writers like Gemma Files every once in a blue moon. Reeves could get there eventually and I devoutly hope she does.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
