Book Review- Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children.

Dark, intense and wonderfully strange.  Delightfully filled with the creepiest and most intriguing vintage photographs, all marvelously crafted into a peculiar tale of dark fantasy and intrigue.

As a young boy, Jacob lived for the nights that he would sit curled up at the edge of his bed listening to his grandfather’s spellbinding tales. With stories from an enchanted orphanage designed to take in the oddest, strangest and most exceptional children and keep them safe from the monsters of the world.

Stories filled the air of a girl who could fly, a boy filled with live bees, an invisible boy and even a girl who could create fire in the palm of her hands. His grandfather would tell him that these stories were as true as the Holocaust but as Jacob grew older, the doubts began to settle in his mind. Even with the cigar box of photographs used as proof, they were not enough to make him believe.

Then something extraordinary happened; extraordinary and terrible all at the same time and that’s where Jacobs’s life truly began. Starting an adventure of a lifetime, haunted with the stories and his grandfather’s last words, he heads to a small island on the other side of the world. With his aim to find the truth behind Miss Peregrine and the home that sheltered his grandfather along with the peculiar children.

This amazing book weaves you through the echoes of before and after, dappling in time travel and temporal loops, constantly thrusting you from the same day in the past to the present day, over and over. Taking readers on an adventure of a lifetime, giving you time to discover each peculiar child and the mysteries of their secrets.  As this book delicately weaves in the tragedies and fears of the Jews in the time of World War II you are chased by monsters reminiscent of the Nazis, monsters they call hollowgasts. Horrors in their own right, with pungent rotten flesh and gnashing jaws, filled with grappling tongues, ready to devour their innocence.  This is not only just a story with echoes of monsters seen as beasts, but that of monsters made of humans. Leading you to believe that this story is not only about a safe house for wayward orphans with magical powers but one that was created to be a vault for the horrors of a war era.

Ransom Riggs is mad genius. From taking the time to transform photographs from a lost era and fabricate them into such a mysterious tale, to the way he delicately weaves history and heartfelt sensitivity all with in your face intensity. A book written with a boy’s perspective and therein made to identify with a boys mind. Filled with delightful lines and funny quips; taking a refreshing spin on magic, dark fantasy, time travel and history. Highlighting the worst of humanity and making a way for a person to emerge from those ashes as brave, honorable and even magical. 

The adventure continues when the second book to this series   "Hollow City" is released this January. 

*Have the opportunity to meet Ransom Riggs in person and have you book signed- This Friday at Keplers in Menlo Park at 6 p.m.