Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

It’s more like Riggs pulled elements together to form something new, while using popular stories to help achieve the proper tone and sense of familiarity that would play into the realism. Miss Peregrine’s reminded me of so many things, but not in a repetitive or lazy way. Though marketed more to young adults, Riggs’ novel is very Literary, with the capitalized L quite necessary. On top of that, the writing’s beautiful and complex. Somehow, though, it all feels so real, as though, hidden just beyond our site for their own protection, these people and abilities really do exist. There’s time traveling, wights, nightmare creatures, women who can change into birds, and children with powers. Often, magical realism is the slightest touch, but, here, Riggs achieves that seem feel while building out a much larger fantasy element. One of my recent loves in fiction is magical realism, which Ransom Riggs does spectacularly here. He wants to visit the home to which his grandfather went as a refugee, on a small island off the coast of Wales.įrom this point on, the novel changes, becoming more fantastical, but always retaining a real sense of history and realism. In order to face his future and overcome his mental health issues, Jacob feels that he must confront his grandfather’s past. Such an endeavor makes the darkness and the fear easier to handle, putting some distance between oneself and the truth in a way that opens up the mind for greater understanding.įollowing a family tragedy, Jacob is forced into counseling and finally sets off on a journey to Wales, accompanied by his father, working on the latest in a string of literary projects doomed to fail. In an undertaking somewhat reminiscent of Art Spiegelmann’s Maus, Jacob’s grandfather retells the war in the guise of supernatural beings, rather than mice and cats. With the innocence and imagination of youth, Jacob believed his grandather’s tales, but, as he grew, Jacob came to understand them as his grandfather’s metaphorical way of understanding the events of WWII. Miss Peregrine’s opens in the real world with an ordinary boy, Jacob, and the stories his grandfather would tell them. In fact, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is something of a fairy tale, something of an allegory, and something real and powerful all at once.

Spoiler: this is not what the book is about in the least.

Based on the cover, I was expecting a horror novel about a house full of creepy children who kill innocent travelers or something.

For a book that’s highly hyped, I had no idea what Miss Peregrine’s was about. Once again, I am sitting here laughing at the difference between actuality and expectation.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs