Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - Reviewed by Courtney Kirchen

Book Review: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Review by Courtney Kirchen

The novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was a fairly good book. The author used quite a bit of metaphors and had an excellent use of imagery. As the book went on, the plot got more and more interesting, keeping me involved, and not wanting to put the book down.

The story centers around a character named Jacob, who believes he has a crazy grandpa. They think he has post traumatic stress disorder from being in WW2, because he frequently claims to see monsters. The thing is he may not be lying. Through the use of pictures and action, Ransom Riggs keeps the reader flipping the pages, and the plot gets more and more interesting.

Everybody believes that Jacob’s grandpa is crazy. But after Jacob finds his grandpa in a bloody mess out in the woods, he sees a weird person. And by weird, I mean this person had no pupils and had snakes coming out of his mouth. “I saw a face that seemed to have been transplanted directly from the nightmares of my childhood. It stared back with eyes that swam in dark liquid, furrowed trenches of carbon-black flesh loose on its hunched frame, its mouth hinged open grotesquely so that a mass of long eel-like tongues could wriggle out” (Riggs 32). Jacob’s friend didn’t see it, so Jacob wasn’t sure if it was just a hallucination or what. Jacob takes his grandpa’s last words into consideration, and ends up on Cairnholm Island with his dad. There he meets kids with supernatural powers, stuck in a time loop, and he realizes that he is just like his grandpa, and the monsters are real.

This novel contains pictures, mainly of people Jacob meets. These pictures are creepy, yet accurate to what Riggs describes them as. This adds a visual element to the story, which makes the book harder to put down. “It couldn’t have been a coincidence, which meant that the photos my grandfather had shown me-had really come from this house” (Riggs 116). This was where Jake found out that his grandpa wasn’t making up these people the whole time, they were actually real. These people were extraordinary, and Jake was just finding this out. The downside of the story is that it is a very easy read, and it is slightly elementary. It’s not as creepy as the cover promotes it to be. On the other hand, it is original, and unlike many other stories out there. It starts off pretty good, and the ending is even better. The ending had a lot of action, and it was like a movie playing in your head. Jacob and his new found friends got into a battle with the species that killed his grandfather, and it endangers the lives of either Jacob or his enemies. The ending was really good, but you will have to read it to find out exactly what happens.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children wasn’t the best novel in the world, but maybe that’s because I like a slightly darker element to my stories. Overall, I would give this book 3.5 out of 5. It had its up and downs, but the author’s use of images and the strange plot of the story are very interesting. I would recommend this book to anybody who doesn’t mind reading a paranormal book, something that is unrealistic. Yet it is interesting, and hard to put down. This is a pretty good book, and can stretch out to a wide variety of readers.