Frightful Friday: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Frightful Friday is a weekly meme in which I feature a particularly scary or chilling book that I’ve read that week. Feel free to grab the button & join in!

This week’s featured book is Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs:

Reading level: Young Adult
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Quirk Books (June 7, 2011)
ISBN-10: 1594744769
Source: Gift

From a young age, Jacob has always had a close bond with his Grandpa Portman, spending hours listening to stories of his grandfather’s youth spent in a children’s home in Wales.  According to his grandfather, he was shipped to this home at the age of twelve because the monsters were after him.

If the stories about the monsters weren’t outrageous enough, the stories of the children’s home were pretty unbelievable as well:

It was an enchanted place, he said, designed to keep kids safe from monsters, located on an island where the sun shined every day and nobody ever got sick or died.  Everyone lived together in a big house that was protected by a wise old bird…

 

The children weren’t normal children at all, but peculiar: “a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him, a brother and a sister who could lift boulders over their heads.”

As Jacob grew older, he stopped believing his grandfather’s stories.  Like the rest of his family, Jacob attributed it all to his grandfather’s age.  Then one night he receives a call from his grandfather, asking for help.  What he discovers forces him to rethink the validity of his father’s stories and he takes off on an adventure to find the remote island, and the peculiar children who may still inhabit it.

I admit; I try not to be influenced by book covers. In this case, that, along with the title of the book, made me literally leaping for joy when I received this book.

Told both through Jacob’s point of view, the story is accentuated by glorious and gorgeous, yet also chilling, vintage photographs:

Reading the book description and viewing the book trailer (below), I expected this book to be more of a horror novel. Instead, it’s a book that I believe crosses genres. It is the tale of a young boy, struggling to come to terms with his own identity and purpose in life, simultaneously question everything he has believed to be “normal.” It’s a delightfully-detailed fantasy, combining time-travel, paranormal beings, and a touch of romance as well.

Rigg’s writing, combined with the lush photographs, allows the world of Miss Peregrine’s home to come to life right before the reader’s eye, experiencing it alongside Jacob. Completely unique in nature, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is sure to delight readers of all ages, from YA to adult.  I consider this book to be not only a delightful read, but an unusual, yet delightful, piece of art, meant to be saved and savored. Highly recommended.