★★★★☆ Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs
Peculiar kids and peculiar pictures
Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children
Ransom Riggs
Peculiar kids and peculiar pictures
Ransom Riggs's Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, is the first book of his Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series.
The story is told in the first person by Jacob Portman. Growing up, Jacob's grandfather Abe Portman told him a lot of tall tales about his travels, which inspired Jacob to want to become an explorer. As he grew older, though, Jacob realized that, although Abe did indeed have a mysterious past which even Jacob's father didn't know about, the stories Abe told could not possibly be true. Then when Jacob is 16, Abe is murdered.
Abe leaves behind a mystery, which Jacob determines to solve. In pursuit of that goal he travels to tiny Cairnholm Island off the coast of Wales. It transpires that there is more truth to the impossible stories Abe told Jacob than he or his father had believed. On Cairnholm Jacob finds and explores the ruins of the old house/orphanage where Abe lived in his youth.
The first third of the book is a mystery-novel introduction to this alternative reality. I knew, from the title and from having seen a trailer for the movie based on the book, that we were eventually going to find some magic children. The careful mundane mystery introduction seemed slow -- I wanted to get to the good bits.
But then, when we finally got to the good bits, they were not quite as good as I'd hoped. The world-building seemed ad hoc, without any real logic to it. Also, it seemed a little too much like "Harry Potter meets the X-Men." That is, besides being ad hoc, the world-building and story felt a little too much like an amalgam of story ideas that had already been familiar long before Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children was published.
One special thing is worth mentioning. Riggs is a collector of old, strange photographs, like the one on the cover. Forty-four (if I counted correctly) such photos appear in the book. The characters and story were suggested by these photos.
It wasn't bad, just not as wonderful as reviews had led me to expect. Still I do plan to continue at least to the second book in the series.