Ink Stains: Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children Review

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Title: Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children
Author: Ransom Riggs
Series: Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #1
Publisher: Quirk
Publication Date: June 7th, 2011
Genre: Supernatural; Mystery; Fantasy; Young Adult
Pages: 348
Format: Kindle ebook
goodreads

A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of very curious photographs.

It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets 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. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive.

A spine-tingling fantasy illustrated with haunting vintage photography, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children will delight adults, teens, and anyone who relishes an adventure in the shadows

"I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen."

Jacob Portman was anything but extraordinary. He was rich, friendless, and labeled crazy by all his family after witnessing Grandpa Portman brutally murdered by a monster that only he remembered seeing. He sees a therapist and barely survives everyday life, all the while being haunted by Grandpa Portman’s dying words.

Find the bird. In the loop. On the other side of the old man’s grave. September third, 1940.

Jacob Portman has always looked up to his Grandpa, seeing him as a hero and someone worth idolizing. When Grandpa told him stories of children with mysterious powers, he believed every word, not just because of his faith in his grandfather, but because of the strange pictures Grandpa Portman could conjure up as proof. A floating girl. An invisible boy. A boy who had a family of bees living inside of him. A girl with the ability to ignite fire. And strangest of all, the monsters that Grandpa Portman always seems to talk about. Monsters he claims to have spent his whole life fighting.

Jacob stopped believing in his grandfather’s stories when children started to tease him for believing fairy tales. His grandfather stops telling his stories when he stops believing them, and he soon writes off Grandpa Portman as crazy; that is, until the day he dies.

Jacob journeys to find closure and, more importantly, the truth about his grandfather. In the small isolated island Cairnholm, nothing much seems possible. On an island with only one restaurant, telephone, and hotel/pub, what could possibly have led to Grandpa Portman’s mysterious stories? One day, when Jacob journeys to the bog containing the decrepit house of Grandpa Portman’s stories, he sees something that he will never be able to un-see.

Ransom Riggs talent for imagery brought the mysterious atmosphere of this book right into my world. I could feel the mud of the bog beneath my feet and smell the diesel of the electricity generators of the island of Cairnholm. The monsters were as real to me as they were to Jacob in the story. Riggs engrossing language held me page after page, unable to look away until the mystery was solved. I gasped aloud when I read the final reveal and bit my fingernails as the harrowing final battle played out.

"My grandfather had described it a hundred times, but in his stories the house was always a bright, happy place- big and rambling, yes, but full of light and laughter. What stood before me now was no refuge from monsters but a monster itself, staring down from its perch on the hill with vacant hunger. Trees burst forth from broken windows and skins of scabrous vine gnawed at the walls 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."

One of the greatest things for me about this book was the pictures in the story. It brought reality into something totally and unquestionably unreal. Of course, when I saw them, I knew that they were manipulated. That is, until I read the first few sentences of the Author’s Note. The photos in the book, the totally and utterly impossible photographs, were in fact real. When he found the photos, they inspired Ransom Riggs to write their improbable story.

This book is one of my new favorites. From teens to adults, all will love this book to its very spine. It questions our beliefs of what can or can’t be real. It challenges how we react to the impossible. It makes us rethink the peculiar. This book taught me one very important thing:

Being peculiar is sometimes the same thing as being great.