My next book on my list of books to read this year is Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs, a bizzare story with a very uniqu approach to it. So let's dive into this very "peculiar" story! See what I did there?
Here's the story, Jacob Portman grew up listening to his grandpas crazy stories about living in a children's home after leaving his whole family in Poland, to escape the Nazi's Holocaust Camps during WWII. Some of the children that lived there were a girl that could fly, an invisible boy, a boy with bees living inside of him, and a girl that could summon fire from her hands. But like most kids, as Jacob got older, the stories became more of a fairytale, even though his grandpa was convinced they were real. One evening, Jacob gets a call from his grandpa, who is hysterical and claiming the "monsters" had found him and were after him. So Jacob and a friend go to his house to calm him down, thinking there were just mind tricks from the war getting to him. Jacob discovers his grandfather dead in the woods and sees a horrific monster hiding, and his friend claims he never saw.
Some time goes by and Jacob goes into complete depression after witnessing his grandfather die in his arms, and everyone not believing what he saw and heard that night. After discovering more secrets about his grandfather, he finds out that he was receiving letters from the headmistress of the children's home, Miss Peregrine, asking for him to come home to an island in the United Kingdom. After some convincing, Jacob and his father go to the island, to see if he could get some closure. Some time goes by and he finds the house his grandfather grew up in, only to find that the house had been destroyed from a Nazi air raid over 70 years ago. Confused with what happened while inside the decaying house, children come inside calling his grandpas name, seeing if he returned. Jacob chases after them and ends up going back to the village and it isn't the same, and finds out he transported back in time to the day of the air raid in 1940.
The children find him and take him back to the children's home, surprisingly in one piece. He meets the headmistress, Miss Peregrine, who tells him all the stories that his grandpa told him were real. And that they've been living in a time loop that she conjures that relives September 3, 1940 everyday, so they can live safe and away from invisible monsters called the Hollowgast who can't enter the time loop, but only certain peculiar children can see, his grandpa being one of them, as well as Jacob himself. He ends up spending most of his days there, discovering more of the life his grandpa had, and then returning to his own time, lying to his father that he was doing nothing all day.
Eventual weird things start happening in the village that set off red flags to Miss Peregrine, mainly the mysterious slaughter of sleeps in the village. Threatened that a Hollowgast is nearby as well as a Wight, a Hollowgast that consumed enough Peculiars that it eventually gained a human form, but still showed signs of being different, Miss Peregrine puts the house on lockdown, forcing the children to stay in the house.
Eventually a Wight manages to get through the time loop and kidnap Miss Peregrine and another Headmistress that escaped an attack in her time loop, and they were kept in cage in their peculiar form of birds. Jacob and the other children manage to save Miss Peregrine but the other headmistress was captured by a group of Wights, and leave for their headquarters. And everyone leaves to find the secret headquarters of the Wights. Which ends the book and starts the next book in the trilogy, Holllow City.
I know I left some things out, but this book was full of so much information, you just need to read it! I LOVED THIS BOOK! I will admit, I attempted to read this book before, but I couldn't get into it, and I had that problem when I read it again, and out of nowhere I couldn't put the book down! I loved how there were so many twists and craziness in the book, which is the type of books I like to read. You can tell I love books that are so bizzare and weird. Also, another thing I loved was how Ransom Riggs used these old weird photos he collected and incorporated them into the story. It was perfect and I was happy he did that in the other 2 books as well. I will definitely be doing a Book VS Movie with this story, but it will probably be after I finish the whole trilogy, and I am excited to see the movie, just saying.
So that ends my review, sorry of it was reallly long, but it made up for my very short review of Hidden Figures. If you enjoyed this review, feel free to read my other reviews, and I will get my next one up as soon as I finish reading Hollow City. If you have a book you think I should read up on, feel free to comment below! I will see you in the next review!
- BorenNerdy
