Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children- Ransom Riggs

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Ransom Riggs

Rating: 3.5/5

The short version: The use of pictures to supplement the text is inventive, and the mythology created around them is very imaginative. However, certain parts of the plot are neglected or superfluous.

This review will contain spoilers.

I wasn’t spooked by Miss Peregrine. The consensus amongst reviewers seems to be that this book gives off a moderate horror vibe, partially thanks to the eerie photo on the front cover and others scattered throughout the book. That wasn’t a let-down for me, though. I don’t enjoy scary books, and this worked well as YA fantasy.

Miss Peregrine is about a boy named Jacob, who sets out to explore the island where his grandfather grew up after he brutally killed in mysterious circumstances. He begins to realise that contrary to what he’s been taught, the wild stories his grandfather told might have been true. He follows a girl to a strange, old-fashioned house and meets the peculiar children who live there, then is drawn into an adventure with them.

The idea for the book came from the author’s collection of Victorian photographs, and most of the characters are based around the people in those photographs. I was impressed by how inventive Riggs was with this; his characters and their backstories are very unique, and their powers match this. One of the girls has a very ordinary picture, but one of them is devoted entirely to the back of her head; Ransom explains this by suggesting that she has a second mouth. I was impressed by such out-of-the-box thinking, but more so by the fact that the characters are more than their powers.

Most of them have been trapped in a time loop, never aging, for seventy years. As such, their behaviour is a strange mix of adult and child, with a side helping of indifference to the strange parts of their life. At one point, one boy talks airily about destroying a nearby village on some nights because it will go back to normal when the time loop resets. That was shocking to me, but served to show how these children have been affected by their strange lives.

Introducing them from an outsider’s point of view was the most obvious narrative technique, but it made for an interesting exploration of the book’s narrator. Jacob makes a lot of irrational decisions, like chasing after a girl without thinking how it might make her feel, and then encouraging her to leave tehe only place she’s safe and therefore making it easier for the wight to infiltrate the time loop. Other than just moving the plot along, it was interesting to see a young protagonist making immature decisions and later making up for them. I really felt like Jacob grew over the course of the book, not least because he was allowed to grieve for his grandfather.

Jacob’s grief was one of the most convincing things about this book for me. It explains a lot of his irrationality and anger. He’s not really allowed to explore it by his parents, and his dad even decides that’s it’s appropriate to get rid of a lot of Jacob’s grandfather’s belongings, even after he says he wants to keep them. Jacob’s determination to visit the island to investigate his grandfather’s tales felt very realistic in that context, and introducing him to people who had known his grandfather was an unexpected but effective way of doing it. It gave him more closure than clearing out his grandfather’s house did.

There were parts of the books I wasn’t convinced by. Jacob becomes romantically involved with Emma, a girl who had a similar relationship with his grandfather. That didn’t feel like it contributed to the plot of the book, and was just a little bit creepy. And maybe it was just me, but the reveal that Doctor Golan was the wight felt pretty inevitable- he was just too keen for Jacob to go to the island. But they didn’t have a major impact on how much I enjoyed the book overall.

A lot of the effectiveness of Miss Peregrine lies on its imaginative interpretation of the photographs and the strong portrayals of its young characters. This came at the expense of the adult characters, like Jacob’s parents and Miss Peregrine, and to a certain extent the strength of the plot, which is why I couldn’t quite give it four stars. But its characters did fascinate me and keep me engaged with the plot, and there are a lot of books I can’t say the same thing about.