Book Review: Bleeding Violet

TITLE: Bleeding Violet
AUTHOR: Dia Reeves
PUBLISHED: 2010
CATEGORY: Young adult
GENRE: urban fantasy
PREMISE: Hanna goes to live with her estranged mother when she's at the end of her rope. Her mother says she has two weeks to fit in or she's gone. Then she discovers the slightly crazy town her mother lives in...
MY REVIEW: Wow is all I have to say about this. It is also not a good wow. It's a "wow, I can't believe this managed to get published". To be fair to the author, it's not utterly horrible. I mean I give her props for using her imagination and writing something that wasn't a love triangle with vampires and werewolves in it. It also isn't as utterly sexist/anti-feminist as Twilight was. However, that's the only decent thing I can say about this book. Oh, and it has a pretty cover.
The main issue I have with this book is that there is no rhyme or reason to anything. It literally felt like the author was making this up as she went. Look, I know I said I wanted creativity but creativity needs bounderies/rules so that it makes sense to the reader and feels real and not just totally random. Unfortunately the author is not talented enough to do that because literally this made no sense and thus felt like a sloppy written in a month novel that wasn't edited.
Then there's a bunch of little things. Characters didn't seem to know what traits they were. Hanna was especially confusing. I know she had medical issues but that's no excuse for a poor main character such as this. Her actions made little sense and don't get me started on the fact that she literally has sex with Wyatt on like a day after she met him and the two decide that they're dating after a handful of conversations. Just...what? Does developing romance and relationships mean nothing to authors anymore?
Then there's stuff like how cold all the characters were, even Hanna. I'm supposed to care about jerks like this? I mean I kind of wanted the demon to win they were that horrible. Then there's the random thrown in violence that makes no sense, the horrible mother who even when she's nice is horrible (encouraging a teen girl to have sex with a guy she just met and to use him for protection? What?), and the bitchy so-called instant friends that Hanna makes. Basically, the whole book was bizarre, in a BAD way. Writing was just passable. I don't know if the author plans to make this a series (I hope to god she doesn't) but if she is, she needs to work on character developement, world building, and a little thing I like to call plot. No this is not the most horrible book in the world (for me, Twilight series still holds that honor) but it's still pretty bad. I wouldn't bother with it unless you want to read it out of morbid curiousity or something.
WHO SHOULD READ: um...I don't know...Twilight fans maybe? But even uber fans would probably raise their eyebrows at this.
RATING: One out of Five violet dresses

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