Every five years, I have a year of no-book-buying, to give myself a chance to read the dozens of books that I own but haven't read. (This is inevitably thwarted by living in West Philadelphia, land of free books, and $1 books, which are essentially free, and locally-owned bookstores at which buying books is a philosophical act, really, so it should be allowed...Anyways,) this is one of those years. And this is one of those books that happened to be sitting around. I was excited to get back to my SF/F roots after a couple of years of heavy "literary fiction" reading, but unfortunately, this was not far enough removed from a life of SF/F reading to stand out.

Miss Peregrine's home is simply generic fantasy. Cliches can be nice if they're good renditions, but this isn't really. There is not a single memorable or unique element. It's fine. Nothing more or less, but fine.

The disclaimer here is that I'm not particularly visual, so I wasn't super into the photographs. I wanted a good story, not a bland story with 10 or 20 old photos that were occasionally spooky thrown in but not particularly tied to the plot in any way or really crowbar-ed in. People who like old and/or creepy photos may enjoy more.