Once upon a time there was a girl who was special. Her hair flowed like honey and her eyes were blue as music. She grew up bright and beautiful, with deft fingers, a quick mind, and a charm that impressed everyone she met. Her parents adored her, her teachers praised her,and her schoolmates admired her many talents. Even the oddly shaped birthmark on her upper arm seemed like a sign of some great destiny. This is not her story. Unless you count the part where I killed her.

16 year old Alison can taste names and colours have a sound to her; she can see the colour food tastes and feel sound against her skin. Alison can do a lot of things, but she has always had to pretend that she can’t. Because her mother is watching and waiting for a sign her daughter is more than weird, she is dangerous.

Now Alison is going to have pretend better than ever. The High School queen bee has disappeared after a fight with Alison, and everyone thinks Alison was involved somehow. Even Alison, who saw Victoria Beaugrand screaming as she was torn to atoms.

Terrified this is the excuse her mother has been waiting for to lock her away for ever, Alison has to pretend to be normal and sane and innocent. But the only person who believes her act is stranger than she could ever imagine.

Ultraviolet is a well-written, but occasionally dissonant book. The characters are convincing and appealing, even when you don’t agree with them you do sympathise with what drives them. The protagonist Alison hurts herself more than anyone else with her twitchy paranoia about who, and what, she is, but as a party to the turmoil in her mind the reader can see why she is like that. Why she makes the decisions that she does.

Alison is written a strong enough character that the concept behind her – the synaesthesia that she is scared to put a name to – doesn’t overwhelm her (in narrative terms anyhow). It is simply another, albeit important, facet of her character. More important to the plot than her hair – ‘the color of cream of tomato soup made with too much milk’ – but arguably less important than her tumultuous, untrusting relationship with her mother.

Synaesthesia is, however, fascinating as a narrative quirk. Alison’s oddly alien perception of the world neatly conveyed by how she describes feelings and tastes intrnally, when not editing herself for normalcy. That said, Alison’s synaesthesia does turn into something extrasensory rather than simply an alteration in perception. Particularly in regard to people, where her sense of their names and personalities accurately reflect their actual natures.

Secondary and tertiary characters are less well-established, but effectively and distinctively enough drawn. It is easy to remember who is who, and possible to argue that their relatively shallow characterisation is a reflection of Alison’s understandable absorption in her own problems.

The plot itself is interesting and leaves room for sequels, yet…doesn’t quite hang together as well as it ought. In fact, it reads almost like two different, although equally good, books. For the first half or two thirds of the book, it was a story about a girl who might or might not have superpowers and might or might not have killed a schoolmate. It is half superhero fantasy and half psychological thriller. The reader caught on the knife-edge question of whether or not Alison was a reliable narrator. I was caught up, engrossed and fully invested in my idea of which she was. And the author wrote so convincingly and absorbingly about Alison’s existence in the hospital that I never questioned this was where the book was set.

Then, suddenly, it was a different book. Still a good book, better in some ways since it introduced two major characters I enjoyed quite a bit, but not the book I felt I had been led to expect up till then. I absorbed the new narrative paradigm quite quickly, but it was still an odd and abrupt shift in tone.

Particularly due to the red herrings dropped earlier in the novel about this exact twist, that were still actually red herrings. My mind kept hooking on that, like a hangnail in an afghan sweater. If you establish a character as mentally ill for coming up with a theory, then having the theory proven should change that status quo.

Still, the twist did introduce a major secondary character, who will hopefully recur in future books. She was quite awesome. [nocrosspost]Ultraviolet [/nocrosspost]is, despite its flaws, an excellent book. Anderson is a solid, interesting writer and the world she has created, if not the one I was expecting, has a lot of potential for future storylines.