Book Review, by Kathryn Atwood
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Exceptional Children by Ransom Riggs
This young adult novel is based on a series of very unusual old photographs
which is a very odd set-up for a book and that nearly worked but in my
opinion, completely missed the mark. I found the central character, Jacob,
extremely unlikeable. His personality issues reminded of me of those shared
by the female protagonist in the young adult novel “Revolution” but that
character had a dead brother, a sick mother, and an absentee father to blame
for her emotional turmoil. Jacob, on the other hand, has a two-parent cushy
life that he can’t seem to get comfortable with. Fair enough, it happens,
but I was never sure how Riggs wanted me to feel about Jacob — was I
supposed to think his self-induced ennui was cool? Was I supposed to pity
him? I didn’t quite get it.
Jacob is the narrator and his writing skill is impressive for a teen(though
often nearly sunk by the overuse of adjectives and metaphors) but this is
explained away by our being told that he takes accelerated high school
classes. His hopelessly hateful attitude and burdened writing were sometimes
difficult for me to slog through. But slog I did and that’s because the plot
points in the first half of the book reeled me so powerfully that I couldn’t
stop in until I discovered what had happened to Jacob’s grandfather (BTW,
the only character I found appealing, a Polish Jew who fought in WWII). But
as I entered the fantasy world of the book’s second half, I felt as if I was
Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale, poised to open a door into a living color Oz
but instead ending up in an peculiar world of drab grey. It’s
different but not terribly appealing or even interesting.
However, it’s a credit to Riggs that even readers who don’t like the book
will probably have difficulty not slogging to the bitter end where we find
some key questions answered, see a key decision made, and watch a sequel –
shamelessly? — being set up. The idea of basing a novel upon quirky old
pictures is one that I find fascinating but the end result isn’t as good as
it looks.
