Dia is a librarian currently living in Irving, Texas.
An original plot, a unique protagonist, and plenty of weirdness
makes Reeve's first novel a satisfying read for older teens. Hannah
Jarvinen is a beautiful, birarcial teen looking for someone to love
her. She speaks the Finnish language and cooks Finnish cuisine. She
wears only purple to honor her dead father, whose ghost speaks to
her. She is strong-minded, wild, lonely, and very troubled. She is
also bipolar and suffers from halluncinations and fits of violet
mania. 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. 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. Portero contains
doors to a dark world that can be opened with "keys" fashioned from
bones. Being used to the strange, Hannah is not scared off, and
instead becomes determined to prove to her mother that she can be
accepted in a town where outsiders are called "transies" (or
transients). She falls in lust with popular Wyatt, or Mortmaine.
When she helps him to defeat five of the lures, she is hailed as a
hero in the town and is compelled to learn more. She becomes
Wyatt's lover, and soon she is by his side hunting demons. Her
relationship with her mysterious mother, however, does not come as
easily. She soon realizes that her mother has her own strange dark
connections to Portero and the Mortmaine. This teen novel is not
for the faint of heart. There is plenty of blood, gore, violence,
sex and bad decisions. The main character would make many parents
cringe. Teens who crave all those things and a dose of the dark
arts will love this novel. Although Hannah is not a character to
emulate, she is interesting. The plot can be a bit confusing at
times, and some situations just do not make sense. For instance,
Hannah suffers no consequences for violently assaulting her aunt.
Nevertheless it is a fantasy, so some suspension of disbelief is
required when reading this interesting debut from an author to
watch. ----VOYA April 2010
Poor Hanna has had a seriously rough adolescence. 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. What's more, the town itself has
doors that open between worlds, often releasing evil forces onto
the residents. 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. 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. The
resulting novel is wonderfully baffling, and as lush, warm, and
conflicted as Hanna herself. 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. 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. -- BULLETIN, March, 1, 2010, STAR
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