Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves

1 star -- I hate it (on principle)

I will write about this book while I feel passionately about it, despite the fact that I've read two others I need to write about before I forget about them completely.

Bleeding Violet is a terrible book, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, much less a teen.

I don't remember why I picked up this book. The flap copy is terrible. The cover is not great (very The Dark Divine, and I don't care for knock-offs). I really thought this would be a terrible book, and I was really uninterested, so I can't explain why I took this home.

But when I first started reading it, I was pleasantly surprised by the book. The character isn't nearly as off-putting as the copy made her seem, and there are definitely some interesting concepts. The book had potential to be really, really good.

BUT it goes downhill really fast.

The main character, Hanna, is 16 and bipolar. She lost her virginity when she was 14 and decides to have sex with the Wyatt after, basically, one date.

While I realize that kids have sex and start early, and that 14 is by no means an unusual age to lose one's virginity, I do take issue with the frivolity with which Hanna treats this issue. She says STDs are for losers, when the plain fact is that STDs happen to those who have unprotected sex. Mistakes happen, condoms break. Anyone who's having sex with someone who's had sex before can get an STD. Anyone who's having sex can get pregnant. When you're writing for teens, you have a responsibility to treat sex carefully. While it's a realistic issue, so are STDs and teen pregnancy. They're not just "for losers."

I also take issue with the fact that Rosalee, Hanna's mother, gives her an entire box of condoms without question. Granted, Rosalee isn't a great mother, but the whole point of the story is that Rosalee does indeed love Hanna, and I think any loving mother would sit and have a chat before handing over a box of condoms.

Both Rosalee and Hanna are also quite proud of the fact that they use sex and their attractiveness as a weapon and that they use men. It's a terrible message to send to teens. Relationships should be mutual and beneficial and not harmful to either person involved. If a girl got raped, the man would be jailed. The feeling, to me, is the same if a girl uses a boy through sex. It's wrong and should not be condoned.

The sex issue gets even weirder when Hanna strips down by a naked boy in a lake, and her mother strips down too. All three completely naked, the boy aroused, and Rosalee starts cutting up the poor kid. The violence and torture is bad enough, but I think having familial nudity and very sexual tensions was completely unnecessary and uncalled for.

Besides the fact that the entire book is swamped in underage sex and other sexual situations, there is also a drug usage issue. Again, I understand that teens do drugs, and I have no problem with the scene where Wyatt and Hanna and their friends "do drugs" (forget-me-not flowers, for goodness' sakes), because that's realistic. But I do take real issue with the mom giving the daughter drugs. While I personally know families that actually do drugs together, I don't think it was ever the parents who said, "Hey, you haven't expressed any interest in this. Let's give it a shot!" but more of a, "Well, they do it and we do it, why don't we do it together?"

And then there's the suicide. Throughout the book, Hanna and others are very violent. But this climaxes when Hanna commits suicide. She slits her arms "from wrist to elbow" (both of them) and smears her blood on the walls of her house to make Rosalee sorry. Granted, Hanna is saved (so that she can commit suicide publicly), but suicide is a very heart-wrenching and real problem. The fact that Hanna is so blase about suicide and then finds her bloody "artwork" "beautiful" is horrifying. Teens shouldn't assume that someone will save them at the last minute. Sometimes it happens, but sometimes it doesn't. And teens also shouldn't be taught that you can change your mind after you commit suicide. You can't. If you do it right, you're dead. If you do it wrong, you're emotionally and, more than likely, physically scarred for the rest of your life.

I feel like authors have a responsibility when they write YA to be or set examples. I don't mean that the stories have to say "Suicide is bad, kids" or "Just say no to drugs!" or that the stories can't have sex, drugs, or violence, but I feel like it should be approached cautiously and with care.

Bleeding Violet feels like a bondage smut book toned down for teens, and it doesn't work. Movies have ratings and books have genres to prevent children from reading or seeing what may not be good for them, and I think Bleeding Violet should definitely not be in the YA fiction genre. It has too much unnecessary sex, drugs, swearing, violence, self-violence, stealing, lying, and hatred. There is a place for these issues, but it's not in the teen sci-fi/fantasy section, and they need to be treated appropriately.

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

4.5 stars -- I like it quite a bit

Jasper Fforde is well-known for his Thursday Next novels and his Nursery Crime series. I really liked the Thursday Next novels when I read them (the first few at any rate), and I believe I've read the Nursery Crime novels and liked them even more, but I may be wrong...

Fforde's writing is a bit drier than I normally like, but there's a cleverness (perhaps sarcastic wittiness?) to the writing that's nice and the background of the stories is so inventive that I can't pass up reading them.

Shades of Grey is the same.

On a future earth, humans are sorted into colortocracy, which is based on what color they can see and how much of it rather than money. The main character, Eddie Russett is a red (a russett to be exact...). He's traveling, for the first time, with his father, a swatchman, this future earth's version of a doctor. It's punishment, really, but Eddie looks forward to being able to impress his intended when he returns home and to the new experiences he'll gain.

He gets more than he bargains for.

I don't want my reviews to just be plot recitals, so I'll stop there, but I really did enjoy this book. It did take me a bit to get into the book (I let it sit for 6 weeks after starting it until I ran out of other books), but that tends to happen with all of Fforde's books. At first the plots seem so incomprehensible and the worlds so weird that it's hard to get into. But at the same time, it's lovely, because the author isn't just spoon-feeding the plot. The readers actually have to pay attention and try to figure out what's going on.

The world Fforde imagines for Shades of Grey is fascinating. There are absurd rules, and strange diseases, the color green can be used as a drug, and combinations of colors can revive a person. People die of a mold and are sent to be "re-booted."

Although the entire novel takes place over a mere four days (and so much happens that it feels like it occurred over months), the novel is an elaborate set-up for the coming books. It's basically a progression to show how Eddie, a loyal rule-follower if ever there was one, comes around, and in the end, I genuinelly began to like the poor fellow.

So if you have some time, this book is worth delving into, and I hope that the following books are even better. I look forward to them if only to find out what exactly brought the world to this state. It should be a fun adventure for all involved!

World War Z by Max Brooks

5 stars -- I love it!

First of all, sorry it's been a while. It's been busy at work, so even though I haven't been blogging much, I haven't been reading much either.

What I have read, though, is World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, which is just amazing.

It's also horrifying, but not in a bloody, violent, gory way. More in a "Now I know I won't survive the zombie apocalypse way." Which I won't. No way.

World War Z is written as a series of interviews. Fictionally, Max Brooks is a reporter who, after WWZ, documents the events of the war for the government. The government takes the cold, hard facts and leaves the interviews that are "too personal," so Max Brooks turns them into this book.

The book never breaks character, and it's terrifying. Set up in loose chronological order, the reader reads interviews with doctors, scientists, military, lay people, and even feral children from around the world.

The first interview takes place in China with the doctor who discovered Patient 0. There are interviews about how different countries did or did not survive. There's an interview with an entrepreneur who developed a completely useless "rabies vaccines" and became a millionaire while supposedly vaccinated people died (and the arose again). A feral child tells, in her childlike speech, how she survived when her mother tried to kill her in order to save her from becoming a zombie. We follow workers in Canada who walk through after the Spring thaw and kill any re-animating zombies.

The picture Brooks paints is bleak. Too little is done too late, and massive amounts of the population are lost. Some countries are entirely overcome (like Japan) or just disappear (North Korea), while some countries not only survive but prosper (Cuba).

And the odd thing is that humans win the war. There's an incredible coming-together of people and countries to beat back this foe, and there's an enormous amount of invention and re-learning. If the future and the past weren't so bleak, this would be one of the most heartwarming tales imagined as countries and peoples unite in one combined force with one combined purpose, working together to regain lost territory.

But the scope of what happened, which I believe was incredibly underplayed in the book, is enormous and almost unimaginable. The book gives the barest glimpse of how horrible things truly were, barely touching on some subjects that made me, at least, recoil.

World War Z is amazing, and Brooks did a wonderful job. The way he was able to write technically or creatively depending on the character, his acclimation of actual historic events, the scope of his imagined world--it's breathtaking.

I really, really recommend that everyone reads this as there's a little bit of something for everyone, yet as a whole, it pulls together as a strong and well-written horror novel. But it's not bloody or gory or offputting in any way.

So read it, be horrified and completely fascinated at the same time, and then do what I plan on doing and invest in some bullets... :)