For the last
5 years, Poppy had been playing a witch in Hollywood, acting out bizarre,
magical happenings with a flair the classic Samantha Stephens would be proud
of. Eventually, fiction and reality collided, making her a real witch instead. Cool!
To gather
her wits and, hopefully, learn to harness her new witchy powers, Poppy leaves
the west coast and heads home to Alabama, where she agrees to judge the town's
beauty pageant. Of course, the backstabbing ways of Hollywood did not compare
to the manipulative, vile ways of pageant politics. The term "passive
aggressive" could only loosely describe these overbearing stage moms, who
could be "vicious, armed with their Red Bull, yoga pants, and
'interesting' highlighting jobs." (24)
When the
pageant director is found dead, face-deep in the potato salad, curiosity gets
the best of Poppy. "Heather was the kind of woman who made people daydream
about killing her. Maybe one of those people had decided to live out that
dream." (47) So now it seemed that Poppy would have to re-play her TV
character as a witch detective.
I thought
the story was witty, funny, and all-around charming, but there were some
lagging areas, especially when leading up to the case. Reading through it, I
often wondered when she would get to the sleuthing or when she would get to the
hocus pocus. I mean, this was a witch mystery, right? Mainly all I heard was
Poppy blathering on about the haughty insipidness of the young beauty queens
and their crazy mothers, and, somewhere in the background, she was keeping an
eye out for the killer. The case almost felt like an afterthought.
Overall,
this was an okay mystery, but it wasn't quite what I was expecting.
My rating: 3.5 stars
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