Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

I really wanted to like this book (MISS PEREGRINE). I loved the idea of a book informed by creepy found photographs, the book description promised abundant creepiness, and reading the first 60 pages right before bed granted phenomenally creeptastic dreams. I was pretty confident that the rest of the book would be equally delightfully creepy.

It was not. MISS PEREGRINE is basically A Day In The Life Of The Mutant School In X-Men bookended by 60 great creepy pages and one great creepy scene of a monster in the rain.

The book description and the first 60-ish pages suggest that it's the kids who are creepy, what's creepier than kids? (Don't believe me? Go watch Firestarter, and The Ring, and Children of the Corn, and Let The Right One In, then we'll talk.) So it's pretty disappointing when the kids turn out to be, basically, junior X-Men, and the abandoned ruins of the mansion in the woods are mostly experienced in their full, pre-ruins glory courtesy of some wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff. The big bad is a not-so-creepy bog-standard (hah! bogs! it makes sense if you've read this, I promise) monster that isn't even relevant for the majority of the book.

The story itself, rather than a creepy little horror story, is a little like Harry Potter I: an outsider discovers a new world, and most of the book is dedicated to setting up the appealing new world rather than a mystery; but HPI is much better, JK Rowling is a better writer, and MISS PEREGRINE establishes itself early as a creepy story with a big mystery to solve, it is more obvious and significantly more problematic that it isn't either of those things.

The photos are amazing but problematic in a couple ways. First, they're not consistent: photos of different people in real life who look nothing alike are presented as photos of a single character; the appearance of the characters (clothes, hair, facial expressions) and photo backdrops are often obviously inappropriate for the time they are supposed to represent. I was pretty surprised when it's first revealed that this is a WWII story because the photos up to that point appeared much older -- 1880s-1910s.

Second, the photos are poorly integrated. I wanted the photos to add something to the story, for readers to have to examine the photos carefully to learn everything we need to know about the story (sort of like a graphic novel, I guess, where a lot of unwritten information is contained in the illustrations). But they don't. It feels very much like the author picked a handful of photos at random and inexpertly inserted them into a pre-existing story with descriptive text that boils down to "and then I saw a photograph and it looked like this" tacked on next to the photograph. The photographs aren't necessary, so why are they there? (Or rather, the photographs are awesome, but the story is not, so why is the story there? Apparently Ransom Riggs has also published a book that is just found photographs, no story, which I might like better.)

I won't be reading the sequel and based on MISS PEREGRINE I won't be reading anything else by the same author. (Though I might take a look at the book of found photographs.)

(Unrelated but amusing, at least to me: the last 2 books I've finished are by YA authors with amazing double R names -- before this book by Ransom Riggs I read a book by Rainbow Rowell.)