Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Not only are the characters in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children peculiar, but so is the novel itself.
There’s really nothing too terribly unusual about the book’s main character, Jacob Portman. He’s a 16-year-old quiet kid with a pretty uneventful life and only one friend, who is nothing like Jacob and who Jacob summoned as more of a body guard than a friend. Even Jacob’s relationship with his grandfather, Abe Portman, isn’t strange. Jacob grows up listening to Grandpa Portman’s bizarre stories of monsters and the band of peculiar children he was sent to live with during World War II to escape from the Nazi’s. Abe even has photos of these kids (which are eerily dispersed throughout the novel), and while the young Jacob initially believes these stories, he begins to think his grandfather is a nutcase. Until the night Grandpa Portman dies in his arms, and Jacob sees one of the old man’s monsters with his own eyes. But it’s not just seeing the horrible creature that gives Jacob a reason to seek the truth, its’ the last words uttered by his grandfather—“Find the bird. In the loop. On the other side of the old man’s grave. September third, 1940.”
At this point, Jacob sets out to find the answers, and for a good portion of the novel, we’re taken on a journey to the small island of Cairnholm in the UK. Here, Jacob finds the mysterious house where his grandfather lived as a child—Miss Peregrine’s house—but unlike the wonderful place Grandpa Portman described, the house is in shambles, the recipient of a bomb from WWII. Upon entering the ruins, Jacob encounters a group of children—the children from his grandfather’s photographs—and the reader is immediately thrust into a world of good versus evil, magic, time travel…even a little bit of wizardry and sorcery.
And with this change, comes an unwelcome change in the pace of the novel. Riggs introduces the mystery of Abe Portman and the peculiar children eloquently, but with enough fire to keep me turning the pages. He describes beautifully the relationship between Jacob and his grandfather, the island of Cairnholm and its residents, the battered remnants of Miss Peregrine’s house. And then suddenly, the story becomes a series of chases and battles intertwined with a cheesy teenage love story that seems all too modern, especially when all but Jacob are children of the 1940’s. And worse, the novel doesn’t actually end. Its last few pages indicate a possible sequel.
As a writer, I love the mystery of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. I feel the story could’ve taken a different, more realistic path, even with the peculiarity of the kids. But for me, the shift to fantasy took the excitement and beauty of the novel away.
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