Miss Peregrine’s Home
for Peculiar Children is the debut novel by Ransom Riggs. To start, here’s the excerpt from the
publisher:
A mysterious island.
An abandoned orphanage.
A strange collection of very curious photographs.
It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive.
It’s hard to rate how I felt about this book. It started off leading me to believe this
would turn out to be a great horror novel with a mystery thrown in there. The incorporation of the photographs went
well and blended better than later in the book.
Jacob served to be an intriguing character and the trip to the island
was a perfect set-up to continue the intrigue.
Once he found the old house, the story decayed much like the weather
beaten structure he found.
This is the point where the story turned from a good
mystery/horror story to a whimsical fantasy of time travel and mutant
abilities. Don’t get me wrong, this part
by itself is a cute story of children living a life where Groundhog’s Day meets Neverland.
They never age, they never mature and they never truly hone their
abilities the way some seventy odd years of practice should. It is also the point where the seventeen year
old Jacob seems to revert in age himself and begins to act with the eight year
old mentality of the children he meets.
The reveal at the end of the book was predictable and led
straight toward the introduction of the second novel. The sad part is, I would normally want to
track down and read the next book to continue the story but find I am
uninterested in knowing what will happen to the characters. I also found the inclusion of the photographs
to be distracting. Where I find it
interesting to see the source of the writer’s inspiration, his description of
the photographs was more than sufficient and would have served their purpose better
had they been included at the end of the book where I could view them when I
wanted.
All in all this was a cute adventure story about a group of
misfit children. Love it or hate it, I'll leave that decision up to you.
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