Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Author Ransom Riggs' first novel, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is a quirky combination of fantasy and vintage found photography. Jacob, the main character in this story, is a sixteen year old living in present day Florida. Throughout his childhood Jacob has a very close relationship with his grandfather, a Polish Jew and a survivor of World War II. An excellent storyteller, Grandpa Portman shares many of the events of his life with Jacob in this way, telling Jacob about his time spent living in an orphanage, fighting in wars, and surviving in the wilderness.

After his parents put him on a train out of Poland when he was twelve, Grandpa Portman grew up in an orphanage off the coast of Wales. He describes this place as a paradise, a place meant to keep children safe from terrible monsters, "on an island where the sun shined everyday and nobody ever got sick or died." When Jacob wants to know more about the monsters, Grandpa Portman tells him that they are "awful hunched-over ones with rotting skin and black eyes." Definitely enough to give a little kid nightmares, but it isn't until Jacob gets older that he begins to doubt the truth of his grandfather's tales.

Now, at sixteen, Jacob hasn't believed in Grandpa Portman's monsters for a long time and dismisses them as a fantasy version of the real monsters of his grandfather's childhood. "Monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep," the reason Grandpa Portman was the only one in his family to survive the war. What Jacob cannot believe in at all are the stories about the children Grandpa Portman claims to have shared the orphanage with. Children who were more than just peculiar. Jacob believes his grandfather's photographs of a levitating girl, a boy lifting an incredibly large boulder with one arm, along with many others to be fake, meant to make a little boy believe in fairy tales. However, when his grandfather meets a horrific and sudden death, Jacob sets out to the remote welsh island of Grandpa Portman's childhood in search of the truth.

Reviewed by Kayla Britt