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Poppy North

  
  We meet Poppy in Secret Vampire.  She’s a petite sixteen year old girl who’s into world music, especially trance.  She’s been best friends with James Rasmussen since kindergarten and has already decided that she’s going to marry him. He just doesn’t know it yet.  In Secret Vampire Poppy is diagnosed with cancer.  It’s then that James reveals that he’s a vampire and changes her to keep her from dying.  She shows up for a few minutes in Soulmate where she meets Hannah and jokes around with James.

     Secret Vampire opens with Poppy waking up.  She thinks about how there is no school, and is happy.  Then she gets a pain in her stomach, but she refuses to give into it.  This shows two things about Poppy:  One, she’s not dwelling on the negative.  She’s looking for the bright spot (summer vacation)  Two, she’s stubborn, something that’s proved time and again as the book goes on and she holds a grudge against James when she thinks he’s pitying her, and when she holds her ground against Ash when he tries to hit on her.

     Poppy is creative.  She manages to defend herself against Ash even though she physically can’t do anything to him.  And humorous.  Can you forget the remark she made to Phil about being a sex pixie?

     Poppy seemed very childlike in the beginning, very pixyish dancing around the kitchen with a box of frosted flakes, thinking about how she’s going to marry her best friend James whom has never shown any romantic interest in her.  As the book goes on though, Poppy’s life gets more difficult (cancer and a best friend who’s a vampire) and Poppy seems to change with it, becoming more serious.  She even seems somewhat wise, such as when she’s explaining to Phil that she’d “rather die and wake up a vampire than die and not wake up at all.”  It seems to me that she began to view the world through different eyes, suddenly realizing that it wasn’t all sunshine and roses, but that it wasn’t all despair either.  She became wiser.

Quote From:
Secret Vampire by L.J. Smith
 
Reflections on LJ Smith
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Since 05/30/02
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