Book #103: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Book #103:  Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

August 4, 2014

People like Brandon Stanton, Ron Howard, and Rod Stewart believe that every picture tells a story. Riggs took that concept further with this book; he discusses in an interview at the end of my electronic copy how he was inspired to the write the book based on these bizarre photos that he’d started collecting from flea markets, these random black and white vintage snapshots of creepy-looking kids. The narrator of the book, Jacob, is introduced to these pictures by his grandfather, who talks about the “peculiar children” he stayed with at a home on an island of Wales, where he’d been shipped to escape the Nazis in Poland. Jacob eventually comes to believe that the bizarre old pictures were doctored, like how fairy pictures were doctored back in the day. That’s probably the case with the weird pictures included in this book, which inspired it, but Riggs wrote this book with the assumption that the pictures were all real.

This is a young adult novel, and it was actually the one that I’d wanted to read when we broke out into books (the book I was assigned instead was  The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks), because I was intrigued by the concept. It was pretty cool to consider how Riggs incorporated these random pictures into the story, but I honestly feel like the pictures got to be a bit much. I mean, some of it felt kind of forced in the story. There’s no real explanation for why Miss Peregrine takes so many pictures, and I felt like the story could have used a plausible one. In this day and age, when I can fit countless photos, and take them any time I want, on my iPhone, I still don’t take for granted the fact that photography was kind of complex in the 1940s. Plus, many of the pictures look quite a bit older than that, which doesn’t make sense even with all of the time-travel details of the story.

I felt like the plot that Riggs created, with the time-loops and the hollows and the wights, all fit together tidily and I don’t take issue with any of that. My problem is with Jacob himself. Clearly, he gains self-confidence in the story and grows as a character, but I want to know more about Jacob from before. I was bothered at the detail of him not having any friends, besides the one kinda punkish guy he hangs with at the beginning of the book. I didn’t get whyhe didn’t have friends. He describes himself as being “average,” and I believe that, but average guys have some friends. Is he shy? I would get that he would be shy, but the book doesn’t really show me that. Is he super duper awkward? He seemed pretty clever to me, as a narrator, so I didn’t see him as being awkward. Throw in the fact that his family is rich, and now I’m very baffled. We’re supposed to believe that the life he is leaving isn’t a great one, anyone, but I’m not buying it. His mother is superficial, his father is an unaccomplished wuss, but before the events of the book, that seems to be the worst of it. I’d rather Riggs made him a dickhead, a rich snob who thought he was too good to work at Smart Aide (one of the chain of drug stores that his mother’s family owns in Florida), and then have him be traumatized by his grandfather’s violent death, and have a determination to go to Wales and check the whole situation out. That’s a Jacob that I could have warmed up to, and it would have made his decision to go with the rest of the peculiars much more poignant.

The fact that we do get some interesting tidbits about Jacob’s life before being thrown headlong into all of the details that tie up the pictures makes it all the more frustrating. I guess this book just wasn’t what I expected it would be. The fact that now Nazis are more or less involved is almost eye roll-inducing. I didn’t really dig this book the way I thought I would, but I’m not saying that I wouldn’t go on to read the next one at some point. Perhaps an accurate assessment of this book, for my perspective, is that the set-up wasn’t really satisfying, but the execution got me on board. As I said, the complicated world that Riggs has created is rich and interesting, and I have no doubt that more surprises are introduced in the following book. I have a feeling, though, that the next one will probably have more, rather than less, pictures to supplement, and I don’t necessarily feel that that’s a good thing.