Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

I love you too, I wanted to say with as much hurtful sarcasm as I could muster, but she hadn't seen me, and I kept quiet. I did love her, of course, but mostly just because loving your mom is mandatory, not because she was someone I think I'd like very much if I met her walking down the street. Which she wouldn't be, anyway; walking is for poor people.

-Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children


If you were to flip through a copy of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, it's the photographs that would catch your eye*.  The photographs are all rather, well, peculiar: photographs of children apparently levitating and lifting boulders and standing covered in bees. These unusual children are the focus of Ransom Riggs's book.

Although I was intrigued by the photos, I was also concerned that they might be nothing more than a gimmick; the story just a way to string one photograph to the next. Luckily, there's more to Miss Peregrine's Home than that.

The story centers on Jacob, a teenager living in Florida and filling his days with increasingly byzantine attempts to get fired from his job at a drugstore. (It will never happen, as his family owns the chain). His life is privileged but otherwise mundane--nothing peculiar about it at all.

That is until something quite pivotal happens, something that divides his life into Before and After, as Jacob puts it.  It's traumatic, but it has implications beyond the post-incident nightmares and therapy sessions: it convinces Jacob that the stories he heard as a child--fantastic stories his mysterious grandfather told about his own childhood, stories that centered around the photographs scattered throughout the book--might actually be true.

This realization prompts Jacob to seek out the place in England where his grandfather spent part of his childhood, under the care of the elusive Miss Peregrine. It's a rich world, populated by characters who do the book's strange photographs justice. There's adventure to be had there, certainly, but it's also a place where Jacob wrestles with some thorny emotional issues--issues that I'm loath to bring up without spoiling the story, but ones that I found it interesting to mull over.

The end of the story sets up Riggs quite nicely to continue the story in a sequel (or series).  I'm most certainly on board to continue the journey with Jacob whenever the next book is released.

Up next: The prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (which I've actually already finished--behind once again!).

*Though the design of the pages themselves, I might add, is also quite striking.