Review: Wink Poppy Midnight by April Genevieve Tucholke
10:30:00 AM
Genre: Contemporary, Mystery, YA
Published: March 22, 2016 by Dial Books
Rating: ★★★★★ 5/5 Stars
Summary (From Goodreads): 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.
Usually I'm not a fan of
contemporaries. But then again, Wink Poppy Midnight isn't your average
contemporary. I feel like I begin every contemporary I review in a smilar way,
but I can’t stress it enough when a contemp surprises me this much. This is a
story I devoured in a single sitting one Saturday evening while in a particular
reading slump until I could no longer keep my eyes open, and then as soon as I
woke up Sunday morning I finished the last 30 pages while I ate breakfast.
Either it's a quick read or I just had that insatiable need to continue, either
way it's a book I feel everyone should read.
Whereas most contemporaries are about coming
of age stories or falling in love or making something extraordinary out of the
ordinary, Wink Poppy Midnight was
none of these. It was so much more than just a singular
element. It had romance, yes. The characters were kids in high school. There
was a sort of magic you'll only find in old barnhouses where the floorboards
creak to the tune of cicadas in the late summer evenings. The kind of magic
instilled in little kids as they run wild and uncaged, and the magic of
simplicity.
My kind of contemporary involves lyrical
writing, a sort of John Hughes or Wes Anderson vibe and whimsy, and a story
that resonates. Wink Poppy Midnight hit on all of these and more. In fact, I
would really love seeing this adapted to the screen by the mind of Wes Anderson,
it just had that feeling to it, reminiscent to movies like Moonrise Kingdom and
The Kings of Summer. I could go on and on about the writing in this book for days.
I could gush over the pure poetry the narration oozed, the way the story was
made that much more real and tangible in its details. Little quirks characters had
like dusting powdered sugar on as perfume or writing in silver on black paper
or collecting rare books, it's what made the story more human because I could
easily fall in stride with their personalities.
The characters were as varied and striking as
they come. No two were alike and none fell flat. Wink easily became my favorite
because of her narration and her unique voice. The last book I read that I
loved this way was We Were Liars by E. Lockhart, for its lilting and haunting
language and twist ending. Wink Poppy Midnight had the same vibe to it, where
the story was told in the details. It was unconventional in more ways than one
and it spoke to a sort of nostalgia we all have for things we never
experienced.
I don’t know how to do this book justice
without spoiling the whole darn thing, because I could pick it apart and put it
back together again and each time I would find something new I love. I feel
like in order to truly appreciate the story, reading it in one sitting won’t do
it justice. I need to reread it and savor each and every bit of it.
If you’re like me and dislike most
contemporaries, give this one a shot and see if you change your mind. Even if
you dislike the story, the unique style of writing and the dimensional
characters are guaranteed to deliver.
0 comments