Watching the snow fall outside, makes you want to curl up with a book. Mine certainly wasn’t a cuddly, hug-y kind of book. Instead, it was C. Desir’s Bleed Like Me. Like the first book of hers I read, Fault Line, neither will leave you feeling like all is right with the world. Instead, they both paint realistic pictures of girls in crisis. A current and more heart-breaking version of Patricia McCormick’s contemporary classic, Cut, Amelia Gannon is a cutter, using this pain to comfort her invisibility in a family that went from three to six when her parents decided to adopt three young boys living on the streets of Guatemala. And when she meets, Brooks, who has been raised in foster care and runs drugs, she follows him down the path of dangerous love, feeling like she could belong to him and feel loved, instead life becomes more hopeless with dead-end jobs and taking drugs that numb the pain.

I’m checking of Desir’s book as my “book written by a female author” on my 2015 Challenge. What did you read this snow day to check off your reading challenge list?