Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children
by Ransom Riggs
Think back to those school days when you were assigned 20 pages to read out of your history textbook every night. Remember those nights on the edge between a full-blown migraine from focusing for hours and passing out from exhaustion because of the excessive concentration. Those seemingly endless pages crammed with more words to look at, the comprehension of those words lost at page 1. Then the angel of late night cramming would appear; a picture. There on page 394 is a map of post WWII Germany that takes up over half of the page, vanquishing the potential passages and bringing you one giant leap closer to sleep. You smile, maybe cry, from relief. This picture is your salvation. Images in books are a savior for begrudging readers everywhere, to lessen the words you have to read, but this is not the case in Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children. Those pictures are unnerving and contribute greatly to the particular peculiarity that is this novel,
This book is filled with old timey pictures like this one;
Ah, what is this! Why it’s a disturbing clown face painted on the back of someone’s head. I was told never to describe things as “creepy” due to its overuse by my generation, but alas it seems fitting when describing many of these pictures scattered throughout this novel. These paranormal pictures are the driving point in this book, both in its plot and in its intrigue.
Jacob Portman comes across these assorted pictures as he hears his Grandfather’s colorful and impossible tales of his time at an orphanage filled with peculiar children with a variety of gifts and attributes and of the monstrous dangers that hunted them. Jacob doesn’t truly believe him until his grandfather is murdered and Jacob sees with his own eyes the grotesque monster that did it. Now Jacob is bound by the vision of the tentacle-mouthed demon and his grandfathers dying words to find the long abandoned orphanage from his grandfather’s outlandish stories to find answers, otherwise he could be the next in line at the golden gates.
Soon the reader and Jacob literally fall into a different world filled with peculiarities and ancient grudges. We meet the people in the pictures, a group called “peculiars” who posses many differing traits; a girl who needs weighted shoes to keep her from floating away, a girl who can throw fire, and a child with a mouth on the back of their head (yes, this is the same kid from the scary clown face photograph). These odd children are a mix of kids who should either belong at Professor Xavier’s school for gifted youngsters or in horror movies singing scary nursery rhymes.
The children, however unnerving in the photographs, turn out to be friendly and a joy to read about, but the Hollowgasts are not. The monsters that hunt peculiars will hunt you in your dreams, so if you are into that, let this story scare and intrigue you. Just remember there won’t be any boring maps in this book, just real and peculiar photos of floating kids and scary clown faces to brighten your day.
