Book Report- Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

 

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Ranson Riggs

Quirk Books, 2013

This is a book that wasn't recommended to me by a friend, it's something I picked up while stuck on a 14 hour layover in Chicago on my way back. Needless to say, I finished it in that amount of time.

I picked it up because it was on the New York Times best seller list, and the whole story was based off of a bunch of real historical black and white photographs of strange people and mostly children. As I happen to LOVE creepy historical photographs, I figured that it would be a pretty safe bet.

Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed. I expected something original and moving, especially since it was a New York Times bestseller. The story however, read a lot more like some of the books I read in junior high. Which was disappointing since he had a lot of really cool photographs to go off of.

The story goes something like this- There's a boy whose grandfather tells him stories about this house he grew up in with a bunch of kids who could do abnormal things like turn invisible and make fire with their hands and fly and stuff. The kid never believes him until his grandfather dies in a mysterious way and then he goes to Wales to research his grandfather's life. Needless to say, he discovers that the children were actually real, and they are also still alive in a time loop. And then of course, he finds out that he's one of them. And not just one of them, but of course the only one who can save them from the peril they're now in.

The book did have some cool imagery, like a headmistress who turned into a bird or a time loop that got hit by a bomb every night, and some of the ways he described things were pretty, but the story was very stereotypical, and read very much like childhood fantasy. I kept waiting for something original to happen, he could've expanded so much on what was there. And then at the end there was no resolution, just a set up for a second novel.

Although it was an easy read, fairly brainless entertainment (which sometimes I love), I wished he had done a lot more. These pictures are so MAGICAL that I guess I expected a story to expand them and make them more so. Maybe it's my own fault for loving the mystery of old pictures, and that the story can be whatever you want it to be. Maybe a book about them never would be able to measure up.