Review: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - Ransom Riggs

Where I got it: Library

Rating: 5 stars  

Cover Rating: 5 stars (Creepy and perfect. I love the little filigree around the title and such.)  

Genre: Young Adult  

Publication Date: June 7, 2011  

Publisher: Quirk

Page Count: 351 p.

Buy it: Book Depository / Amazon

Jacob's life has been pretty ordinary. The most excitement he has is his grandfather's fantastical tales about a home he lived in. In this place, he said, there were girls who could float and boys who had bees living inside them. All the children that didn't fit in anywhere else came here. They were watched over by an old bird. Jacob doesn't believe that these are 100% true tales, and eventually stops listening. When his grandfather dies under very mysterious circumstances and Jacob sees something in the woods, he starts to wonder if maybe his grandfather was crazy, and if maybe he has gone crazy too. Jacob can't get his grandfathers final words out of his head, so he searches for the things that were mentioned. This leads Jacob to a mysterious island near Europe with his father. Here Jacob figures he can learn some pieces of the truth about his grandfather, and the peculiar children he once knew.

Wow. This book was so different from the typical YA fare. It still had an angsty teen boy in it, but he was intelligent and had a great mystery set out before him. The pictures were all quite peculiar and some downright creepy (like the clown-twins pictured on the back cover). Ransom Rigg's wrote Jacob very well, he had lots of emotions and questions and was just a fantastic and touching character. I loved the stories his grandfather told about the peculiar children. I only wish Jacob's grandfather was in the book more often, he seemed like an offbeat kinda guy. All the character's came to life, and I loved the description of the island. It sounds like a presently dreadful place to be. It added a great element of dreary suspicion to the whole story. I think this is a fantastic novel for all sorts of people. It's contemporary, has paranormal aspects, magic and a creep-factor with plenty of mysteries to keep you tied up.

First Line:
"I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen." 


Favorite Line:
"It was an almost-too-perfect morning."