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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Book Report, 10/28/2015
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Ransom Riggs
Copyright – 2011
382 Pages
“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.” – Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs. It’s as if this one sentence quote itself is a summary of the entire story. In reality, there are plenty of monsters with human faces that seem normal. I would say this book is in a fiction>>science fiction>>adventure type of genre.
“I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen” as the main character, Jacob Portman, says to himself in Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children. That is a perfect quote for an example of the beginning of this story. Jacob was ordinary for a while, listening to odd fairytales his grandfather told him when he was much younger. His grandfather believed his stories to be true but Jacob played his stories off in his mind as his grandfather just getting old. Jacob worked, his grandfather did crazy things every once and a while, and everything was normal until his grandfather was murdered. Who would want to murder a sweet, old, crazy man? Maybe he wasn’t crazy, maybe his stories were true. It’s Jacob’s turn to find out after he finds little notes from his grandfather to go to an island and find “Miss Peregrine”, and “find the bird, find the loop.” As Jacob starts to think and wonder, his parents get very concerned for his mental health and has him meet with a psychiatrist, named Dr. Golan, who instructs him to go to the island and house, which was bombed and destroyed.
Jacob and his father go to the island his grandfather spoke of as he died before him. There he finds the house and a strange girl who he follows. Following her, he finds the “loop” of time. The loop Jacob has entered the day the bomb dropped on the house and the day replays over and over safely because of Miss Peregrine. Miss Peregrine is a ‘peregrine’; a person who controls time. Miss Peregrine can also turn into her natural “form” as a bird. She is the protector of the peculiars; Jacob finds out that he is a peculiar as well meaning he can see the monsters that try to kill the peculiars, specifically they try to eat them. The monsters begin attacking the village they live by and kidnap Miss Peregrine. Jacob and his fellow peculiars go out on a search to find Miss Peregrine. Once they do they find that she is in her peregrine form and can’t turn back. As they begin to head home they find Miss Peregrine couldn’t keep the time loop up and the house had been destroyed. As a whole group Jacob and the other peculiars have to decide what to do. Jacob decides to stay with the peculiars and they go out looking for more peculiars to fight the monsters. That is where this first book ends.
Overall this book is about magical beings fighting their enemies after being stuck in a time loop during the time of the Holocaust. As the main character steps into the time loop things start to move forward and the bad monsters come about trying to eat the good peculiars. There’s also a bit of a romance which is quite odd considering the main character’s grandfather and the girl had a thing in the past, but a new relationship forms between the girl and the main character.
This is a cute, odd book and I loved it! It was so strange but the way the author, Ransom Riggs, wrote the book it was so interesting. It’s almost like a science-fiction book, which is exactly the type of book I like!
I’d recommend this book to most people who like science-fiction and who like a little bit of an odd twist. As I said before in the paragraph before, this book is a type of science-fiction and not everyone enjoys that kind of book. Miss Peregrine does speak full “science” on a few pages and it gets difficult to understand. This book is for children from middle school to high school, but considering the vocabulary it might be best for high school and on. I’d suggest everyone to try every genre so this might be the book for you.