Author: April Genevieve Tucholke
Published: March 22, 2016
Hardcover, 247 pages
4 Gold 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.
This is the kind of book that leaves you wondering what really happened the minute you close the book and long after. It makes you think ,second guess, and want to go back and re-read it after knowing the ending. What's real, what's not real? Is there really magic and it did cause any of the things to happen, or was it all inside someone's head? I love these kinds of books. They give me something to think about long after I've finished and make me question things I believed or didn't believe throughout the book.
Okay, so I know I'm being super mysterious, but there's no real way of reviewing this book fully without giving things away. The description of this book is vague for a reason. But I do still want people to read it, so I'll give it a try. Midnight has been in love with Poppy for as long as he's known. He was her first and her his, but it meant more to Midnight than it did to Poppy. Midnight is sweet and uncertain and has finally stood his ground and stopped letting Poppy control him. This is when he meets Wink, his new neighbor and the weird girl from school. Midnight and Wink immediately form a bound and Poppy hates it. Poppy needs to have it all, Midnight included. Thus starts a web of lies, humiliating acts and dangerous things that no teenager should be involved with.
Setting plays as big a part as the character do in this story. We see the story through all three of their perspectives, therefore we see the same houses and areas from each of their eyes as well. Scariest of all is the Roman Luck house, an abandoned house not far from where they live that Wink believes is haunted, Poppy is scared beyond belief of and Midnight just finds creepy. It is a character and plays a huge part, a part that I still can't get out of my head. Another major setting is the hayloft at Wink's family farm. It means something different to each character and weaves together a story only they know the truth about.
The characters were all unreliable, all had secrets, and all did thing they shouldn't be proud of. Even though this may sound like I hated them, I loved each and every one of them in a different way. Midnight, as naive as he was, knew he'd done things he shouldn't have done and wanted to fix them. Wink, possibly my favourite character, should not be underestimated. And Poppy, oh Poppy, she is the kind of character we're all supposed to hate. She's the bully, the mean girl, the one who uses and abuses, but I loved her. She had so much depth and just wanted to be liked and I fell under her spell like the rest of them.
A tale of mystery, intrigue, magic and bad things, this book will stay with me for a long time and will probably feel completely different if I read it again. I had a chance to meet the author yesterday and I could see how she weaved this together, why she made these characters the way she did, and it made me love it even more.
"Revenge. Justice. Love. They are the three stories that all other stories are made up of. It's the trifecta.”
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