ARC Book Review: The Girl With the Blood Red Lips

The Girl With the Blood Red Lips

V.B. Marlowe

ARC Disclaimer: I was not paid in any way by the publishers to review this book favourably. The review is my own honest opinion (Whether or not it is agreed with).

Publication Date: April 25th 2014

Publisher: All Night Reads

Pages: 182

Genre: Fairytale, Contemporary, Young Adult

Neva is different. Aside from having a phobia of mirrors and an unquenchable desire for apples, she harbors a dark secret. She's been cursed to repeat the same three years of her life over and over again. Unfortunately, these three years happen to be Neva's sophomore, junior, and senior years of high school, and high school's not that easy when everyone considers you a freak. To break her curse, Neva must accomplish a grisly task that she can't bring herself to complete. Will Neva break her curse in time, or will she be bound by it forever?

Thanks to Netgalley and All Night Reads for allowing me to read and review this.

The Girl With the Blood Red Lips is a unique take on Snow White. Neva (as she currently calls herself) was once the Snow White of tales, but instead of falling asleep after biting the apple, she is cursed by her step-mother to relive the last three years she'd had over and over again, along with several curses in relation to that original tale (such as craving apples, not being able to look into mirrors and having the kiss of death).

I found the prose for the book enjoyable to read, and I found the world unique and interesting (though a little bit confusing which may fix itself in the future books). It mostly suffered in pacing. It started a nice speed, with characters being introduced and mysteries and issues being introduced at a good pace, but everything went way too fast. I think the second half of the book could have stood to be much longer in length, with some things being dragged out longer.

For the most part I enjoyed the characters, even if they were a little one dimensional at times (Mia and Hadley embarrassingly so, for reasons I'll explain in the Spoiler part of my review I really wish we had been able to connect with these two characters).

As a warning, although it is hinted at a few times in the first half of the book (which plays out like a light contemporary supernatural YA), the fact that the book takes a sharp turn into becoming a horror book took me a bit by surprise. It almost felt like two separate books, and although I did enjoy the first half quite a bit, I wish that the story had been the second half of the book and full out horror. This book would have for sure stood out from other fairytale adaptations in a good way if that had been the case.

Oh and I have to mention how much I love the name Neva. That's been one of my back-pocket names forever, and I had known the meaning (snow) so I smiled over that little connection.

Mia and Hadley's deaths seemed to be predictable. Henry doing it as well is also predictable, too predictable that I was guessing it might be Noelle instead (how insanely awesome would that have been? It would have blindsided everyone and made the book and her character more layered). But, what I really wish was that we had grown to care for Mia and Hadley as characters somehow, that way when we find how they are killed for Neva we can feel even more horrified than we do already.

The realization of who Aubrey is definitely could have been expanded on a lot more, and the Henry versus Neva scene could have easily spanned a few chapters adding to the suspense.

The epilogue felt like it had had too many things stuffed in it as well. As soon as I heard Raj was obsessed with grape-flavor I wanted it to be cyclical so badly with hints that maybe Raj was going to have to kill Neva somehow to get rid of his own curse and then left it off there without us every figuring out what happened to her next. Sort of a "you can never truly escape" kind of deal. But of course, I'm a fan of Horror YA, so it's not surprising that I wanted it to be that way.

I recommend this book for people who want a different kind of fairytale adaptation, one that doesn't involve a castle, fantasy or actual princesses. I also would like to mention that there is a horror twist at the end so be prepared for that, but until then the prose is light and enjoyable. 

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