Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

I recently started reading Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by debut novelist Ransom Riggs.  I stayed away from the book for a long time because, if I'm being honest, it looked too creepy for me (I'm a self-proclaimed wimp!).  The black and white cover depicting an eerie little girl levitating in the middle of a desolate forest struck me as interesting but highly disturbing.  Yet when I discovered that my favorite YA author John Green highly recommended the book, I finally decided to give it whirl.  I mean, if that literary genius enjoyed the book then who was I to ignore it?

So I picked it up a few days ago and am now on page 143.  Although the book has given me a few freakish dreams, I am thrilled I decided to start reading it.  The main character, Jacob, is a teenager whose closest relationship is with his grandfather, Abe.  As a boy, Jacob listened to Abe's stories about growing up in a children's home where all of the kids were...different.  One girl could levitate (the creeper from the cover), one boy was invisible, and another boy had superhuman strength.  All of the children possessed special attributes, but what made them special also made them vulnerable to indescribably evil monsters.  The children's caretaker and protector, Miss Peregrine, was a large hawk "who smoked a pipe" and kept the evil at bay.  

Jacob believed his grandfather's stories wholeheartedly until he started getting teased at school for believing in "fairy stories". From that point on, Jacob doubts his grandfather, believing him to be an exaggerator who made up the stories in order to deal with the great losses of his childhood during the Nazi regime.  But one fateful evening, Jacob's grandfather is killed.  Even worse, he is killed by one of the monsters from the stories...and Jacob bears witness to this event, bringing all of the "made up" tales back to life.  Abraham's dying words perplex Jacob and send him on a journey to the island of the children's home where he searches for answers and Miss Peregrine, the "hawk" who can protect him from the evil that destroyed his beloved grandfather.

One aspect of this book that I love is the atmosphere that is so skillfully created by the author, Ransom Riggs.  He uses a combination of actual found photographs and detailed descriptions of setting in order to create a constant uneasiness in the reader.  As Jacob wanders through the abandoned children's home of his grandfather's past, he stares "frozenly at what looked for all the world like skins hanging from hooks" and "fireplaces throttled with vines that had descended from the roof and begun to spread across the floors like alien tentacles" (p. 84) Details such as these are what kept me from sound sleep over the last few days.  They evoke the feeling of a haunted house, a place that might swallow you up if you stay too long searching for answers that might never be found.


While reading this text I am reminded of a horror movie I once watched called The Woman in Black, starring Daniel Radcliffe a.k.a 'the kid who played Harry Potter'.  This movie has certain elements that are quite similar to that of Ransom Riggs's novel:  the misty bogs of the British Isles, mysterious abandoned homes, children who are at the mercy of evil forces.  Having seen this film, I find it very easy (maybe too easy) to conjure up ghostly images in my mind as I read about the world of Miss Peregrine and her peculiar children...so much so that I am reserving this book for daytime reading only. Told you I was a wimp!