Saturday, March 30, 2019

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Book 30 of my 2019 Reading Challenge
read from March 14 - 23

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Book 1 of the "Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children" series
by Random Riggs

Summary (via Goodreads)
published 2011

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.

My Opinion
3 stars

This is probably one of the few times I will say I think this would be better as a movie than a book.  Although the action picked up at the end there were lots of lulls and it took some time to get started since it was all from a kid's point of view and it took longer than I expected for him to catch up to where I already knew it was going.

I didn't dislike it enough to stop reading the series, especially since my daughter owns them so they're easily accessible, but I'm not in a huge hurry either.  I'm hoping that the rest of the series will be more like the end of this book now that he knows some of the mysteries and they're on an adventure but am also a little wary since one of my girls didn't finish the second book and another one (the one who owns the series) read the second book but hasn't continued on yet.

A Few Quotes from the Book
"I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen."

"And that is how someone who is unusually susceptible to nightmares, night terrors, the Creeps, the Willies, and Seeing Things That Aren't Really There talks himself into making one last trip to the abandoned, almost-certainly-haunted house where a dozen or more children met their untimely end."

No comments:

Post a Comment