Review: Bleed Like Me

Title: Bleed Like Me
Author: C. Desir
Genre: YA Contemporary
Rating: ★★★★

I loved this book. While Bleed Like Me is another YA contemporary, it's different in that darker issues occur throughout the book. There is a romance but an unhealthy romance that circles around addiction and mental health problems. The main characters are Amelia Gannon (Gannon) and Michael Brooks (Brooks). The story is told in Gannon's point of view and the reader learns from the beginning that her life is in shambles. Gannon feels invisible in her life. Her parents focus lies on her three adopted brothers who have major discipline issues. She only has one friend, Ali, who is only her friend because they both have no one else. Gannon constantly feels alone and to deal with this she cuts. But then she meets Brooks and that's when everything changes. 


Does everything change for the better? No. Rather than be addicted to cutting, Gannon just becomes addicted to Brooks. And as time goes on Brooks becomes addicted to Gannon. However, in the beginning their relationship was ok to me, even cute in a way. While Brooks straight up told Gannon that he would not be able to fix her and her problems, he kind of did in a bit of a twisted way. The whole cutting thing with him cutting her kind of freaked me out a bit, I have to admit. I really liked Brooks up until that point. But that's when I realized that Brooks was totally incapable of helping Gannon because he really needed to help himself instead.


The second part of the book is when you really start to dislike Brooks because of how much he changes because of his time in juvie. Juvie had definitely broken Brooks and we see a different side of him that had been lying dormant in the beginning of the book. I'm still debating in my mind if Brooks really loved Gannon or he just loved her dependency on him. I want to believe that he loved Gannon but now I'm not so sure. At one point Gannon wants to go get food because she's hungry but Brooks makes a big deal out of it accusing her of not really loving him. He makes a big deal out of her wanting to leave and it just seemed ridiculous. But then you realize how dependent on Gannon he really is. While in he beginning of the story it seemed like Gannon was the weaker of the two, Brooks has now shown that he is the weakest. He is constantly paranoid that his father is going to come after him or that Gannon will leave him. Brooks is afraid to be alone and in the end this is what causes his episode at the end of the book. 


 

When reading this book the relationship between Sid and Nancy definitely comes to mind. Sid was the bassist in the band The Sex Pistols in the UK in the 1970s and Nancy was his girlfriend. They both were addicted to drugs, heroin being the biggest one. It was a relationship based on addiction essentially and in the end they both died because of it. I definitely recommend the film. While the relationship between Gannon and Brooks didn't exactly revolved around drugs it did revolve around addiction because of their addiction to each other. 

I really just cannot get this story out of my head. This happens a lot when I read darker contemporary stories. People usually ask me why in the world I would want to read a book about this topic, and most of the time I just tell them I find it interesting. At first I thought this book was going to be a bit like Willow by Julia Hoban, which I read a couple of years ago. Both books deal with mental health and the effects of cutting but they are totally completely different stories. I do recommend both books very much. However, if you are sensitive to darker issues that involve mental health and abuse it might not be the book for you.