Reading Menu- Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children-- Ransom Riggs

It's been on my reading list for a while.  I love dark, mysterious, unbelievable stories.  While this is not dark, it is an unbelievable story.

The idea what someone could write a story based off peculiar pictures... awesome.  Makes me want to go out and see what I can find to write about.

I wont bore you with all the deets of the book, but I will tell you why you should go out and read it.

One,  if you can picture a broken down castle haunted with children of the past who never leave, are never allowed to leave, but are not seen with the eye of today's people, you need to read.  The idea of the "loop" as Riggs puts it, that no one can enter unless they know how to enter or are allowed in is the perfect way to keep the common folk out of their peculiar lives so they can live somewhat normal ones.

Two,  if you like the circus folk kind of fairytale, this is a book for you.  The children are all peculiar right, so they all have something that common folk do not have, or something that we would think is weird.  Like superhuman strength, invisibility, the ability to read minds, or give life to non-living things.  It's all right there, everything we wished we could have been as children, right there in the pages of this novel.

Three,  it includes pictures.  I don't mean photoshopped photos either.  Riggs writes at the end that all the photos (minus a few) in the novel were photos that he or photo collectors found via garage sales, rummaging through estate sales or flea markets.  Granted, they may all have been faked at some point in time, but when Riggs collected them, to him, they were untouched and real.

Four, if you like a cliffhanger, an unfinished story with no idea of what could come next, pick this one up.  Yes, it may be written for the young adult, but so was Harry Potter and his series and lets be honest, who doesn't like Harry Potter and his gang?!  The whole time I was reading I really had no idea what was coming because the idea of the book itself was so outside my spectrum of knowledge and beliefs that the whole thing was new and ideal to me.

I didn't really want to get lost in another series (I say that all the time, like with In the Box and Out of the Box) but this one is a good one to ravage the series phase with.

Overall, I would give this one five stars.  For being so different, so well written, so everything I didnt think was possible.  Cant wait to get my hands on the next one.