Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #1)

by Ransom Riggs

[violetpeanut]

In general, I liked this book. It was entertaining and the photos were really interesting.

You must go into this realizing that it is not a horror story, not "spine-tingling" as the product descriptions would have you believe, or even all that creepy. You must also go into this understanding that it is written for young adults - the younger end of "young adult" in my opinion.

Knowing those things allows you to enjoy it for what it is. It's a story about some children with some amazing X-Men like abilities. It has some fun elements and has some components of mystery and adventure. At it's deepest level it's a story about family - family relationships, loss, how you define family. It also explores (a little bit) the nature of time and it's effect on us.

There were a couple of things that took away from the story. First, as others have mentioned, the relationship between Jacob and Emma is a little creepy (and not in a scary way). Second, I did not particularly care for the villains in this book. I didn't think the parts of the story pertaining to their origin were explained well and were a little confusing. In general, they were not believable monsters to me. I understand that this is fantastical fiction but even fantasy creatures should have some ring of truth to them and I just didn't feel that here. It seemed a little cheesy to me rather than scary.

All in all, this book was entertaining enough for me to ignore the faults and I would be interested in reading more if this turns into a series.