Portero contains doors to a dark world that can be opened with 'keys' fashioned from bones. In addition to her mother, she finds a town of black-clad people living in fear of strange monsters called 'lures' and a group of monster hunters known as the Mortmaine. When her aunt tries to put her in a mental institution, she takes a rolling pin and travels to Portero, Texas, to find her mother. She is also bipolar and suffers from halluncinations and fits of violet mania. She is strong-minded, wild, lonely, and very troubled. She wears only purple to honor her dead father, whose ghost speaks to her. She speaks the Finnish language and cooks Finnish cuisine. Hannah Jarvinen is a beautiful, birarcial teen looking for someone to love her.

BULLETIN, March, 1, 2010, STARĪn original plot, a unique protagonist, and plenty of weirdness makes Reeve's first novel a satisfying read for older teens. Her struggles are wrenchingly genuine and often even life-threatening (both against horrors released through the portals and the unrelenting clamor and chaos lurking in her own brain chemistry), and readers will likely literally sigh with relief when Hanna finally captures a bit of good to balance her world. Hanna is a ref reshingly unbalanced protagonist-unafraid of gore or her own sexual power while also being terrified of any loss and unable to handle simple high-school power negotiations. The resulting novel is wonderfully baffling, and as lush, warm, and conflicted as Hanna herself.

Reeves immediately establishes a mysterious, disorienting perspective by allowing Hanna (who hallucinates conversations with her father but, as far as the reader is permitted to know, can also conjure up a swan whose actions impact the actual world) to be the only narrative voice describing the town of Portero and Hanna’s efforts to settle into it.

Since Hanna has nowhere else to go, her mother agrees to let her stay, if she can prove that she can fit into this guarded, hostile town that considers outsiders merely fresh meat for monsters. What’s more, the town itself has doors that open between worlds, often releasing evil forces onto the residents. It’s hard enough for her to accept the death of her beloved father and to manage her escalating mental illness, but when she shows up in the hometown of her mother (whom she’s never met), she discovers that her mother wants nothing to do with her. Poor Hanna has had a seriously rough adolescence.

Bleeding violet by dia reeves