Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

by Ransom Riggs

When Jacob was little, his grandfather would tell him fantastical tales of children who were invisible, or could light fires with their bare hands, or float, or lift large boulders with no effort, or do so many other peculiar things.  As he grew, Jake realized that his grandfather was just making things up and that the monsters he sometimes talked about were just stories designed to scare a child.

But when Jake's grandfather is murdered in his backyard, and Jake sees what he thinks is a terrible, tentacled creature, the grandson starts to believe that maybe his grandfather was telling the truth.

After months of psychotherapy and medication to convince him that was a just seeing things, Jake finally gets the chance to find out the truth.  He gets to go the island his grandfather had told him about and look to see if he can find the mysterious Miss Peregrine and her home for peculiar children.

At first, all Jake finds is a bombed out house with no living creatures nearby.  However, after a second visit to the decayed and devastated building, Jake encounters the children his grandfather had told him about, along with a portal back in time to a loop that repeated the same day in September 1940, over and over again.

Unfortunately, Jake didn't come to the island alone and now he has to make a decision: go home to a life and a world of people who think he's insane, or stay with his new family of peculiars and defend them from the monsters that only he can see.

Final thoughts: Okay.  I'm struggling here because this was so very popular and it even became a best seller.  My problem comes from the fact that this book is almost entirely exposition.  It's like Twilight in the sense that the only real plot comes near the end and only after a very long set-up.  I was often bored and put the book down for long periods of time.  The pictures are fascinating, but they're just not enough to hold my attention and, now that the plot has finally started at the end of the book, I just don't care to continue reading.  There were many things going for this, but not enough to keep me interested.

Rating: 2/5