As Red as Blood
Rating: 3.5/5
Buy or Borrow: Buy
Source: NetGalley (Copy from publisher)
In the midst of the freezing Arctic winter,
seventeen-year-old Lumikki Andersson walks into her school’s dark room and
finds a stash of wet, crimson-colored money. Thousands of Euros left to
dry—splattered with someone’s blood.
Lumikki lives alone in a studio apartment far
from her parents and the past she left behind. She transferred into a
prestigious art school, and she’s singularly focused on studying and
graduating. Lumikki ignores the cliques, the gossip, and the parties held by
the school’s most popular and beautiful boys and girls.
But finding the blood-stained money changes
everything. Suddenly, Lumikki is swept into a whirlpool of events as she finds
herself helping to trace the origins of the money. Events turn even more deadly
when evidence points to dirty cops and a notorious drug kingpin best known for
the brutality with which he runs his business.
As Lumikki loses control of her carefully
constructed world, she discovers that she’s been blind to the forces swirling
around her—and she’s running out of time to set them right. When she sees the
stark red of blood on snow, it may be too late to save her friends or herself.
As Red as Blood is the first installment in the Snow White Trilogy by
Salla Simukka. It was originally written in Finnish but has been translated
into English and this installment was released in August 2014.
I’ve seen a few reviews of this book that say it’s suitable for 13+ but
I’d say it was more 16+. There’s quite a lot of swearing and crude language in
this book, which personally I don’t think is suitable for readers so young.
This story begins with a woman being brutally killed for reasons that we
are not aware of. We don’t realise how important this character is until around
halfway through the book where Natalia is mentioned again.
We are then introduced to Lumikki Andersson. She is 17 years old and
lives in Tampere, Finland, away from her family and hometown. Lumikki is a
strong female character that has learned to defend herself in more ways than
one and struggles to make friendships or trust anyone. One morning, she
discovers something that changes her life rapidly. She walks into her school’s
darkroom and finds thousands of euros hanging to dry, covered in blood.
The story then takes a dramatic turn and Lumikki is pulled into a world
of darkness, to which there seems no escape. After discovering who the money in
the darkroom belongs too, she becomes friends with a girl called Elisa who is
caught up in this situation more than Lumikki initially realised. Lumikki suddenly
finds herself being chased and shot at on multiple occasions. Who are these
people chasing her? Why are the chasing her? What do they want?
The story continues with Lumikki trying to discover where the mysterious
money has come from and who is behind it all. Elisa finds the answer to both
those questions is much too close to home...
After finishing this book, I felt that it could have been a singular
book, as opposed to a trilogy. The only problem that doesn’t really get
resolved in this book is the mystery of Lumikki’s ex-boyfriend, who is
suggested as being the cause of Lumikki’s reclusiveness. I feel as though the
ending would have been more exciting if so much hadn’t already been revealed,
so there was some form of anticipation for the next book.
I think my favourite part of this book is the dark fairy-tale element
that accompanies the central mystery/crime genre it is based around. You find
Simukka has added many suggestions that she wanted to create a fairy-tale
element as throughout the book, there are many times where she will start
sentences with, ‘Once upon a time’ and many smaller, cleverer clues such as the
name Lumikki which in English, translates to Snow White.
I did enjoy this book and I am excited to read the second installment
(As White as Snow), which is already downloaded onto my Kindle but I couldn’t
help but want more from this book. The plot and the characters were both
brilliant but I wanted to know more about the characters and read more description
about what was happening. This book was only 274 pages long, which I found was
relatively short for a story that required quite a lot of detail. Saying this,
I did enjoy it and would recommend any young adult to read it.
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