Wink Poppy Midnight by April Genevieve Tucholke || Glorious Little Psychopaths

Title: Wink Poppy Midnight

Author: April Genevieve Tucholke

Links: Goodreads, Author Website, Publisher

Synopsis: 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 a marvelous book full of wonderful little psychopaths. Totally messed up. And beautiful and wonderful and whimsical and also slightly confusing, but I don’t care because I have decided that I adore this book very much.

I also adore the cover. It makes for beautiful photos.

This book is about three teenagers: Wink, Poppy, and Midnight (never would have guessed that, huh?). It’s also about poisonous friendships and strawberries and tarot cards and mind games and the weirdest, most messed up love triangle I have ever read. It’s also a love triangle that I actually enjoyed reading about (normally I find them stupid) because it was so messed up.

So Poppy and Midnight are dating, but Midnight wants to get away from Poppy because she’s totally emotionally abusing him, Midnight falls in love with Wink, Poppy tries to break them up but at the same time Poppy also kind of likes Wink’s brother. So it’s more of a love square than a love triangle. Or, like, a love pentagon.

The characters were super unique and interesting and basically Midnight is an adorable little lonely spineless thing. Even if he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Poppy is the brilliant, cold, beautiful bully, and Wink is the mysterious, oddball bookworm. All three characters felt real- you don’t feel indifferent toward anyone of them. Love them or hate them, they’ll invoke your emotions.

The writing style reminded me of both The Accident Season (which was my favorite book of 2015!) and We Were Liars and also kind of The Raven Boys? So basically it’s like a match made in heaven for writing style and I naturally adored it.

Except, it did get a little repetitive at times. Practically every time Wink was mentioned it said something about her red hair and green eyes. All the repetitive-ness is what is preventing me from giving it five stars.

And, this is a somewhat finicky thing to complain about, but I’m super disappointed that Wink’s family wasn’t really in the book. They reminded me of Blue Sargent’s family, and I was excited about that, but this book did fall into the pattern of “we have family but we never actually interact with them because we are GROWN ADULTS and yet we are also sixteen”.

I hesitate to call this magical realism, because it is, but it isn’t. It’s one of those books that floats in between genres. Not contemporary, not fantasy, not magical realism. It just is.

I’m going to add a disclaimer, too: this book is for the lovers of beautiful writing, messed-up characters and magical realism. BUT not a whole lot of plot happens. This book is all about the characters, and sometimes the plot gets pushed aside in favor of them. If you don’t care about that, however, basically read this the first chance you get.

I need to start reviewing books more often. And when I actually do review them, I need to post the review on my blog. I read and review this book in March. March. I’ve been intending to put this review on my blog since March. But have I? Noooo.

Anyways, have you guys read Wink Poppy Midnight? What did you think of it? Do you like it or dislike it? Have you ever read a book that doesn’t really fit within a genre?

Happy Wednesday,