A Dark and Twisty Tale

Wink Poppy Midnight

by April Genevieve Tucholke

Young Adult, Magical Realism/Contemp

Standalone

Every story needs a hero.
Every story needs a villain.
Every story needs a secret.

Wink is the odd, mysterious neighbor girl, wild red hair and freckles. Poppy is the blond bully and the beautiful, manipulative high school queen bee. Midnight is the sweet, uncertain boy caught between them. Wink. Poppy. Midnight. Two girls. One boy. Three voices that burst onto the page in short, sharp, bewitching chapters, and spiral swiftly and inexorably toward something terrible or tricky or tremendous.

What really happened?
Someone knows.
Someone is lying.

Goodreads

I have read exactly one of April’s books before the title, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and with a title like that plus the description I knew I had to read that book. The story that I found was mysterious, magical, dark, totally fascinating and had an ending that made me asking for the rest of the story.

Now that I have read Wink Poppy Midnight I feel the exact same way. April has a way of telling a story that is different from anything I have read before and Wink Poppy Midnight had a very whimsical feel to it with all its talk of mystery, fairytales, danger and exciting adventures. I have to say that the town that April created, I want to live there. This town is a weird blend of posh but also has a very homey country town feel to it, it’s like the best of both worlds. The way she describes it I can picture this weird little town in my head and it would absolutely be a place I would move to if I could.

Wink is this fantastical character who tells the type of stories that used to enraptured kids, you know the types of stories that got your full attention as kids, the type of stories you can see playing out, that you yourself would want to play out. Those are the types of stories Wink tells, you can’t help but believe them and the way she tells the stories is a big part of that. Wink and her family are very different and that is where the magical-realism comes to play. With tarot card reading and the Bell home just feel like a magical place with something always brewing in the kitchen and prophecies and tarot cards being thrown about. They are a big loving family and you can’t help but feel that and can I say that Wink has this wonderful nickname for her siblings, she calls them the Orphans, I mean come on you have to love that.

Then there is Midnight. Midnight is a nice guy but a bit of a push over, I mean his relationship with Poppy is so twisted and he kinda plays follow the leader when it comes to girls. I did like his character, he is kind, considerate, smart and he has emotions but that is his character flaw…lemming.

One of the biggest surprises was Poppy. Here is the thing, Poppy is sort of the devil but a more humanized version of the devil. Poppy is mean, she a bully in almost every sense of the word. She controls and manipulates people and is pretty much a bad human being. She gets away with so much stuff and yet there are no consequences. As the story unfolds I found surprising little details about Poppy and her life that made me sort of see her in a new light. I saw how Poppy could turn out the way she did and how her life started to take a wrong turn even before it really took off. Also just gonna say it I didn’t see certain events in her storyline taking place, it was a surprising out come.

With the whimsical way that April told the story, the allure of this beautiful town and the characters like magical Bell family, broken Midnight and Poppy being the devil incarnate I couldn’t help but like this book. I will say that for some reason the ending left me a little sadden and I have no idea why, maybe because it wasn’t the ending I was expecting, I don’t know but I will make up my own little stories about what happens next.

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