MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN

Synopsis:

A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of very curious photographs. Fiction is based on real black and white photographs. The death of grandfather Abe sends sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and explores abandoned bedrooms and hallways. The children may still live.

My Review: 

There is something curiously nostalgic about old, sepia-colored photographs that most often than not show people that we never knew in our lifetimes but still somehow reminds us of days gone by; sometime they even take us to a brief trip within the thin strip of black and white peeling paper that recorded that instant for all eternity.  Peculiar are some of these pictures might be, they still carry within the grainy images that they show, a glimpse of a story that truly happened to someone way before we are creating our own. It is this touch of nostalgia that invited me to grab one of the copies of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children on display, a haunting cover with an eerily levitating girl looking towards me as if she knew I was looking at her.

          This first novel by Ransom Riggs, a collector of antique/vintage photographs speaks volume on the poignant quality of old pictures.  It is done in a unique interweaving of created premise and situations and the use of old pictures from his collection and those of others. Written as a YA story that promises a creepy thrill ride down the supernatural, the prose somehow does not agree with the cover.  What takes place instead is a “tour de force” of psychologically charged situations that if you only place yourself in the shoes of the main character then you will understand how the horror of the peculiarities of the fading shots can bring about the creeps.  It may not be something that a lot of horror YA fans would love but then the book never promised a Halloween worthy trip but something that softly whispers of what might happen beneath the shadows of twilight.

          Reminiscent of Peter Pan and his Lost Boys, Alice and the eccentricities of Wonderland, or even XMen if it happened in the 60s, the book delivers a wallop of visions both by the pictures and those of the words that surprisingly work hand in hand.

**** (4.5 stars)