Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children: Ransom Riggs

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children; Ransom riggs; bildungsroman with creepy photographs, 352p

I was, at first, pleasantly surprised by this book. I've been reading a lot of young adult fiction lately so I came into this one expecting it to be the same, really, given that the protagonist is a teenager. However, very quickly I was disabused of that notion, as Riggs introduces nazis and murder and severe psychological trauma in the early chapters. In some way, I think, the early chapters are the best. The narrator doubts pretty much everything he's been told by his grandfather, doubts his own sanity, and the ties that keep him with his family. And then he goes off to seek this fabled Welsh school where his grandfather lived as a refugee from Poland, and the book starts becoming more genre-predictable. When the most compelling aspect of a book is the narrator questioning his own reality, a lot of the drama is lost when we, and he, learn definitively what's going on. Still, it's a very tightly-paced story for most of the book, never quite getting into excessive harry potter-esque worldbuilding. Sometimes that's a bonus, not leaving the reader to slog through a bunch of fantastical exposition before getting back to the story. Sometimes, though, it's a detriment, when things get explained so quickly that when they start to go awry, I find myself unable to really care about the urgency of the situation, or the danger to the characters.
It's a very interesting premise that Riggs has built here, though sometimes the execution is confusing. It's predictable in spots, heartbreakingly good in others, and, I'd say, a pretty nice effort for someone's first novel. The ending is, shall we say, unsatisfyingly abrupt, and I wonder if Ransom Riggs plans to continue this story. If he does, I hope he manages to skirt the boggy patches of the world he's built and avoid falling into fantasy cliches. But just on its own, this book is sad, a lot of bitter and a little sweet, and on the whole entirely peculiar.