Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

By -

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs

It's hard to resist the creepy vintage photographs in this novel. I assumed at first that the photos were modern products of Photoshop, but they are old, and were found by people who like to look through piles of unknown old photographs. Riggs borrowed the pictures and built a story around them, which I think is really neat.

Jacob is an utterly ordinary teenager in an ordinary suburb, but when his grandfather dies mysteriously, he starts to have problems. Grandpa used to tell him stories about his amazing friends on a magic island, and how he fought monsters--was he lying to a little kid, or could he have been telling the truth? Jacob ends up looking for the real story on a tiny Welsh island, and gets more than he expected.

The writing was good, the story is engaging and creepy, and there's something original about the whole thing that is more satisfying than I would have expected from a well-used storyline. Riggs could easily set this up for a trilogy, but I got the feeling that he didn't intend to do that--though I wouldn't be too surprised to see it happen, given the book's enormous popularity. It's already being made into a movie.

Comments

  1. herdingcatsJanuary 8, 2012 at 8:00 PM

    I really liked the book too. I did not know it was going to be a movie. I am not sure what to think about that. They usually ruin the movies. The Harry Potter movies were good, but the Lightening Thief one was horrid and so was the Vampire's Apprentice and that dragon one - they just make some really rotten movies from good books sometimes and this is a really good book.

    ReplyDelete
  2. MichelleJanuary 8, 2012 at 10:05 PM

    I found your blog through the WTM 52 books thread. I'm looking forward to poking around here a bit and getting some ideas on new reads. Miss Peregrine's home for Peculiar Children looks intriguing so I'll add that to my list for starters. Thanks for the review!

    ReplyDelete
  3. JeanJanuary 10, 2012 at 6:56 AM

    Thanks for stopping by!

    Yeah, the idea of a movie is kind of worrying.

    ReplyDelete
  4. CarylJanuary 22, 2012 at 8:50 PM

    I read this one and enjoyed it; my favorite part was thinking about how he put the story together around the photographs. I think that would be a really fun and challenging project!

    ReplyDelete
  5. JeanJanuary 22, 2012 at 10:15 PM

    Yes, I agree! When I was a kid I had a book called "Made-to-Order Stories," where the kid would give his mom a random list of things and she would build a story around it, and this reminded me of that.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more