Wink Poppy Midnight Review

This week's novel is Wink Poppy Midnight, a dark YA mystery by April Genevieve Tucholke.

When his mother and brother move away to France, Midnight's father moves them to a farmhouse outside of town.  Midnight appreciates this because he's determined to get out of the clutches of Poppy, the horrible, beautiful girl who's been seducing and manipulating him and a bunch of other people.  Across the street from the farmhouse is the Bell's farm, where Wink, her fortune telling mother, and her innumerable siblings live.  Wink understands her life in terms of the fairy tales she reads to her siblings.  When Midnight falls for Wink, Poppy gets extra vindictive.  But Poppy disappears after an incident involving a haunted house and revenge gone wrong, and there's a question of if she ran away into the woods and is stalking everyone, or if she died and is haunting them.

The story is told with short, alternating chapters from each of the three characters' points of view.  Each character has their own distinct voice, to the point where you can pick out the moments they influence each other.  Occasionally, the characters cover an event that another character has already covered, and it becomes clear that at least one of them is an unreliable narrator and someone is full of lies.

The setting is beautiful and haunting, all forest and farmland and neglected buildings.  The language is beautiful too, emotive and sad and vicious.   

The twists made my eyes light as I read them.  I had suspected them, but their unveiling was brilliantly executed.  However, after the initial reveal, they stopped making sense.  Suddenly, I don't understand the characters' motivations.  Why on earth did they do any of this?  Aside from that, the characters' reactions don't make sense to me.  I would expect them to be angry or hurt, and instead they shrug it off and move on.  This is especially irksome because everyone had clear motivations and reactions before the twist, and--like I said--I knew the twist was coming, but I was itching to learn why.  That was going to be the surprise.  But that didn't happen.

I'm disappointed, but it was a lovely book.

***

Next week: Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here, contemporary YA by Anna Breslaw.