Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children is a hard one. I absolutely love the format. The story is a simple but clever one - well, if you like Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters type of stories, which I do. The eccentric Grandfather of a troubled young man is killed in very mysterious circumstances. Jacob - the young man - goes on a quest to uncover the mystery behind his Grandfather's last words to him and this takes him to a remote island off the coast of Wales and a house that was destroyed in WWII. I'm going to leave the description of the story there because I hate to reveal any little part of a novel - I never even read the dust jackets anymore.

The format of the book is the clever part. Handsome - sorry - Ransom Riggs has gathered together a collection of old vintage photographs which he includes into the book as reference and illustration points. I suspect that the parts of the story that seem out of place and jagged, are there because he tried to form the telling around some really interesting photo that he just couldn't leave out of the book. The story doesn't run completely smoothly and the author's editing is obvious in parts. If the photos were removed the reader would have a hard time putting 2 and 3 together to make 5. But the photographs ARE there so the story works.

I also had a bit of a time picturing the main character Jacob. He felt more like a 13 year old boy to me, than a 16 year old. He is awkward at times and over confident at others. There is just a bit too much of a contrast between the two parts to get a clear picture.

This is a playful story which beats too much of its own moral values down the reader's throat. It's like trying to slip that bitter medicine in with the ice cream - you can still taste the bitter medicine. I enjoyed the ice cream parts very much. It is not published as young adult fiction but I think it probably should have been.

I have read that Tim Burton will be making the film (Hooray) and that they have a very good scriptwriter to adapt it - Jane Goldman - who wrote one of the X-Men screenplays (Hooray again). The film could turn out fantastic and I hope so. And they already have the basis for the filming in the photograph collection in the book.

I look forward to the next Ransom Riggs novel and I hope he improves with age. Apparently he will be writing a sequel. Let's hope he doesn't find a cairn and disappear into a loop somewhere.