Review: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

It has been a few days since I finished this book, and I must say it has not left a strong impression on me. I liked it well enough, but I didn’t love it. 

It is about a boy, Jacob, who sees his grandfather dying. Before he dies, the grandfather gives him a mysterious message about finding the orphanage where he lived as a child and “warning them”. Jacob had seen pictures of the other children from the orphanage, when he himself was a kid, and his grandfather had told him that all the kids had special powers. As a teenager Jacob stops believing in his grandfather’s stories, but he goes to the island where the orphanage was in order to get some closure on his grandfather’s death anyway. 

On the island he finds the old, abandoned orphanage, but he soon learns that not all is what it seems on the island, and paranormal adventures ensue. 

As I said I liked this book. I thought the writing was good and the plot was well paced. When the book first came out everyone made a big deal of the vintage photographs used as a plot device in the story. These photos depicted people and children supposedly with paranormal (or “peculiar”) abilities. As it turns out most of the photos are just of regular people, and it is only the description in the book that makes them interesting. A few of the photos did have some “paranormal activity” or whatever going on, but nothing like I expected from the hype. The book would have been pretty much the same without the inclusion of the actual photographs, since the photos were just photos of the people in the book, and not used in the plot as such. 

It is the first book in a trilogy, but I don’t know if I will continue the series. It was okay, but for now I think I have other books I would rather read. 

I gave this book 2,5 stars out of 5 on Goodreads.