Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
June 2011, Quirk Publishing
Young Adult fantasy
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.
A spine-tingling fantasy illustrated with haunting vintage photography, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children will delight adults, teens, and anyone who relishes an adventure in the shadows.
In all honesty, to summarize this review before I begin, this is the best book I’ve read all year. I only wish that I’d read it as soon as it came out so that the story could remain with me for the longest possible amount of time. This is an incredibly rich novel–the characters are well-balanced and three-dimensional, the settings are skillfully portrayed, and Riggs has put enough logic behind the magic of this fictional world to make it temporarily believable.
I only had to read the first two or three pages for this story to capture my imagination. I cared about Jacob almost instantly, and I wanted him to have the sort of adventure that he sought as a young child and to become a hero in his own right. The vintage photography sprinkled throughout the novel blends perfectly with the prose and makes the story all the more engrossing. Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children is a dark and haunting novel that will surely be relished by lovers of the macabre, although its more morbid touches are not overdone, and the book will still prove enjoyable if the reader isn’t particularly fascinated by such things. The characters alone are enough to draw any sort of reader in.
From the narrator himself to the smallest players in the story, every one is at least reasonably well-developed and believable. Their various styles of speaking are easy to distinguish, their traits are balanced, and their personalities certainly match their photographic depictions. The less important side characters almost become part of the setting, contributing to the overall feel of the story scene by scene. The narrative seemed to change slightly along with the scenery as Jacob went from Florida to Wales. Simply put, the settings are remarkably vivid.
The only minor critique I have of this story is that the foreshadowing seemed a bit heavy-handed in places. Earlier plot points were fairly easy to predict, but it didn’t detract from the story as a whole. Later on, Riggs throws in some excellent plot twists, keeping readers on their toes.
This book is a YA must-read that will make you think, make you shiver and, above all, make you keep reading.
Rating: 5 stars
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