Book review

Photo courtesy of Quirk Books

Abandoned in dusty attics and deserted, crumbling homes, photographs – old, forgotten, black and white – are often all that remain of lost moments and people. The frozen, gray faces looking out from pictures hint at mysteries from the past. American author Ransom Riggs delves into these mysteries in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.

The novel, which was published in 2011 and followed by the sequel Hollow City in January 2014, artfully immerses us in the secrets that the inky exteriors of images repeatedly conceal. Eerily blending elements of fiction and vintage photography, Riggs crafts an engaging fantasy within the seemingly grayscale picture of our own world.

Frightening, funny and surprisingly touching, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has the rare absorbing power to draw us out of our ordinary lives and into another shade of our world. At 16 years of age, Jacob Portman continues to be haunted by the unusual photographs that his grandfather showed him as a child. The images illustrate the impossible stories of his grandfather’s childhood home, an orphanage on a small Welsh island and the peculiar children who lived there during the Second World War. It is on this island that Jacob’s grandfather claims to have found safety from the monsters that hunted him and his companions.

“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around – they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late,” Riggs writes.

In the wake of his grandfather’s shocking and brutal murder, Jacob begins to explore the mysteries behind the stories of his grandfather’s intriguing and apparently inexplicable collection of photographs. The photographs lead Jacob to the remote island of his grandfather’s childhood, where Jacob’s search to understand his grandfather’s past reveals how he himself fits into the continuing story. When the same monsters that hunted Jacob’s grandfather begin to pursue Jacob and his newfound friends, the pace of the novel quickens to above a heartbeat, and readers will be turning pages rapidly until the novel reaches its heart stopping conclusion.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children explores how the past can intertwine with the present and how people are connected across time and generations. Resonating across both Jacob’s story and that of his grandfather, Jacob’s growing awareness of the importance of loyalty and friendship shapes the course of his adventure.

The book begs the questions: can we be friends with people who are different from us? What kinds of sacrifices have the power to define friendship, and how can friendship define us? How are we responsible for protecting our friends?

As Jacob’s blossoming friendships lead him down the path his grandfather once trod, Riggs carefully creates a separate, intricately drawn world within our own – the kind of world where mysteries and people step beyond the fleeting images of imagination. It is through growing friendship that Jacob enters the undetectable place where both he and his grandfather ultimately belong.

“If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing?” Riggs writes. “I pictured my cold cavernous house … the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.”

Even though the photographs of Jacob’s grandfather have been a presence in Jacob’s life all along, quietly illuminating the shadowy, hidden world to which Jacob belongs, Jacob must embark upon his own journey in order to understand their true, revealing power.

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary,” Riggs writes. “I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.”

Indeed, readers will certainly recognize the extraordinary, enveloping power of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.

– By Amy Krivoshik, Staff Writer

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