The cover for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (authored by Ransom Riggs) intrigued me for several months before I finally picked it up and began reading. Featured is a vintage, black and white photo of a levitating girl with golden curls and an innocent expression on her sweet face. As I began reading, I was immediately drawn into this strange story, and upon finishing it today I knew I’d be looking for the sequel as soon as possible. Luckily, it just came out last week!

Jacob, teenage heir to his family’s Smart Aid drugstore franchise (think: Walgreens, Rite-Aid), lives a lonely life in Florida, where he has just one “sort of” friend his own age, and grudgingly spends his time working at the family business and mulling over stories his Grandfather Abe told him when he was younger. Since Jacob was a toddler, Abe has told him fantastical tales of peculiar children he knew who possessed different talents, such as levitating, disappearing, and lifting extremely heavy objects, among other equally strange skills. Abe told him that the characters he talked about populated an orphanage on a remote Welsh island where Abe lived during World War II, when he escaped the death camps and was placed there. Eventually, Jacob’s parents forbade Grandpa from telling these magical tales, because Jacob was beginning to believe they were real. 

 

Jacob regularly sees a psychiatrist because he has night terrors, and also suffers from emotional and physical manifestations of his anxieties. After his grandfather suffers a violent and untimely death, Jacob follows his final words and travels with his father to the island Abe described to try to figure out what Abe so desperately wanted him to know. What Jacob hasn’t admitted to anyone is that when he found his Grandfather, barely alive and horribly mutilated, he also saw a hideous monster that caused the death, a monster that nobody else could see. When he asks people on the island about the orphanage where his grandfather spent the war years, nobody seems to know what he’s talking about; when he explores the area he eventually does discover the orphanage, but it is in ruins and appears to have been bombed, and is nothing like the serene, beautiful place his grandfather had described.

As the story progresses, Jacob is taken into a type of time slip, and gradually comes to realize that he himself isn’t “normal.” He discovers true friends, but they aren’t friends who can ever live in his world for any amount of time. He meets the indomitable “Miss Peregrine” and it is she who explains Abe and Jacob’s connection to the orphanage.

Sprinkled with incredible black and white photographs of the characters that inhabit the novel, this book is a thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing read. It reminded me often of Jack Finney’s Time and Again, one of my favorite books ever. I was wondering today if I’d enjoy this book as much if I read it on my Kindle or iPad, or listened to it on my iPod, but I think this is a case where it is best read in print format, because the photos added so much to the storyline. Marketed as a book for teens, I think this story is suitable for any interested, astute reader from age 10 to 100, though the nuances will perhaps resonate more with adults who have experienced various types of loss in their lives. I’m excited that Tim Burton is making a film version of this novel, because I was visualizing it the entire time I read it. Delightful!