Redheaded Reviews: Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

This book reminded me of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in that I felt like putting it down even though people had told me that this was a very good book and yet the beginning is slow and plodding and very boring. Sixteen-year-old Jacob is close to his grandfather whom he grew up hearing stories about this island off the coast of Wales where he had spent the War years (World War II) at on orphanage. As a Jew, he had lost his family to the Nazis but he found a home at the orphanage where the children there had peculiar abilities. Olive could float into the air. Brownyn could lift heavy boulders. Fiona could grow blossoms. But he becomes worried that he's going to be attacked and when he is Jacob sees the monster that attacks him and hears his grandfather's last words to him which are that it's not safe for him here. That he needs to go to the island and the date Septemeber 3, 1940.

Then comes the boring parts with the police interviews and the trips to the psychiatrist because he's having nightmares about the monster. That takes like one hundred pages but it also includes him and his dad getting to the island and him exploring it which is pretty boring too. I mean this book has peculiar children in the title and you don't meet any until page 131 and that's Emma who can control fire and who was his grandfather\s girlfriend. But she thinks that he is a wight, an evil creature that protects the monsters. She takes him with Milliard's, the invisible boy's help, to see Miss Peregrine who can turn into a falcon and manipulate time. She has them on a time loop of one day playing over and over. Yes, September 3, 1940, the night the orphanage blows up from a Nazi bomb. Miss Peregrine knows exactly who he is and informs Emma. He tells Miss Peregrine of his grandfather's death.

He and Emma become fast friends and he tells Emma that he doesn't have any talents like she and the others do. But does he? The Wights are after the birds that can manipulate time and have created time loops for their charges. It's only a matter of time before they come for Miss Peregrine. And Jacob might have to make a decision to stay with the children in the time loop and loose contact with his family.

I have to say I'm glad I decided to stay with the book through the dull and plodding parts because the rest of the book was truly worthwhile. I plan on continuing the series and reading the next book to see where it goes. Jacob is in a unique position of falling for his grandfather's girlfriend, a girl who is still hung up on him and sees him as a substitute. Then there's the mysterious Miss Peregrine who gives nothing away. This was a very good book with lots of lively characters you come to care about a great deal. I give this book four out of five stars.

Quotes

But they worried that I spent too much time alone, clinging to the notion that socializing was therapeutic. So was electroshock, I reminded them.

-Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children p 52)

I did love her, of course, but mostly just because loving your mom is mandatory, not because she was someone I think I’d like very much if I met her walking down the street. Which she wouldn’t be, anyway; walking is for poor people.

-Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children p 63)

“I didn’t know you could fry toast,” I remarked, to which Kev replied that there wasn’t a food he was aware of that couldn’t be improved by frying.

-Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children p 72)

Trees burst forth from broken windows and skins of scabrous vine gnawed at the wals like antibodies attacking a virus—as if nature itself had waged war against it—but the house seemed unkillable, resolutely upright despite the wrongness of its angles and the jagged teeth of sky visible through sections of collapsed roof.

-Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children p 79)

I thought of putting my arm around her, but something stopped me. Here was this beautiful, funny, fascinating girl, who, miracle of miracles, really seemed to like me. But now I understood that it wasn’t me she liked. She was heartbroken for someone else, and I was merely a stand-in for my grandfather. That’s enough to give anyone pause, I don’t care how horny you are. I know guys who are grossed-out by the idea of dating a friend’s ex. By that standard, dating your grandfather’s ex would practically be incest.

-Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children p 230)

I must apologize. It seems I’ve gone and gotten myself shot.

-Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children p 312)

If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize that we were alone I has always known the sky was full of mysteries—but not until now has I realized how full of them the earth was.

-Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children p 338)