Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

It has been an adventure reading Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children   by Ransom Riggs but I did it! Hooray!

I was searching for this book from a lot of time and I knew that Tim Burton, I am a big fan of this director, was realizing time ago a movie with it.

I tried to contact Penguin Random House more than a year ago for a book review copy but it was too complicated, I still have dial-up, I don't know where I sent the e-mail, I didn't hear from anyone and I haven't seen any book.

I didn't go to the cinema for the movie because our blockbuster theater is closed and I refuse to afford to distant cities for a movie spending more than the necessary. It's a time of crisis. Honest.

I also think that sometimes books become part of our life when we need to read them for a reason or another because they are magical objects.

Recently I discovered the italian copy of Miss Peregrine in my book club magazine and I ordered it.

When I saw it I thought: "It's in my chords. Completely!"
I knew it.

Amazing, impressive, beautiful, vintage, you can't avoid to read Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children if you are a fan of Harry Potter. There are many similarities. You'll love this book so badly. Written with love, cure, attention, I confess I laughed and laughed and laughed during the first 80 pages. Well, it was something cathartic, you know, I know what it means sufferance and also the profound problematic that can brings.
So the paradoxical situation lived by the young protagonist Jacob, and the wonderful stunning British humor used by Riggs for describing it permitted me to laugh a lot. I didn't remember the last time I laughed so much and with great pleasure. I appreciated it so badly.

You mustn't imagine that the first eighty pages are a joke. Jacob's life is lucky enough, this is true. Member of a Jewish family he is very rich.

He finds a profound connection with his grand-dad Abe, someone considered eccentric and plenty of strange stories and unusual pictures of peculiar children he told to Jacob he had known in an island in UK during the last  World War conflict.
Jacob loves  these stories, although as a kid he considers them fruit of a fertile imagination.
He knows all names of these children and who they were and what they did in the orphanage where his grand-dad spent some time.
Time pass-by and the mind of his grand-dad starts to be more frail, some familiars say.

One day he receives a terrible calls from his grand-dad: "Monsters are back." Jacob doesn't know what to think and accompanied by another friend he wants to go to see what it is going on for discovering his poor grand-dad dying killed by "something." He is in grade to tell to Jacob some words. Unforgettable ones.

Jacob after the departure of his grand-dad is not believed. He saw a creature, a horrible creature and to him that one killed his grand-dad not a group of wild dogs.
No one believes him and considered half-mad and the pale idea of who he once was he starts sessions with a psychiatrist trying to sort out his problems. The description of all this phase is pretty hilarious, you will see.

His grand-dad was a passionate of Emerson and during his 16th birthday a relative presents him a book by Emerson with a cryptic letter.
It's sent from someone from the British island where his grand-dad stayed at long.

Jacob is decided: why not visiting this place for trying to understand who these people were and if some of them still alive?

The idea is warmly supported by his therapist. After all he adds to Jacob he will heal much more once he will visit that distant place.
Jacob lives in sunny Florida and Cairnholm a completely different universe to him. The island just with a public phone, no cell phone working, just a place where to sleeping and power-generators in the  houses is an adventure!

Jacob is followed by his dad, ornithologist. His dad is another peculiar soul. Someone at first excited by new projects, with more or less twelve books half-written and put aside, a depressed man. Just a little fact can put him down, so that he won't complete his works thinking that no one after all will be interested to reading his words.

It's again a story of a ring, see at the voice The Lord of the Rings or Nesbit or Lewis in the first book of The Chronicles of Narnia the book by Riggs.

The ring is seeing again as a passport for the past and present, for a temporal trip. Who tried to obtain more became a monster in search for these special souls for eating them.

Jacob  will discover in this orphanage where his beloved grand-dad spent time, a wonderful apparent peace, where everyone is happy, where children plenty of magical peculiarities can develop them although they are kept distant from the rest of the society because misunderstood, but also for more important reasons: someone want to search for them for eating them. These children forced to remain children for the rest of their existence, some of them are 80 and more years! would have known a terrible reality going away: the common destiny of all the human beings. They would have become old meeting death once.

This book is poetic, with a beautiful love-story between Emma Bloom and Jacob the nephew of Abe, so beloved by everyone at the orphanage and a strong alliance for trying to defeat the badness incarnated in close creatures known by Jacob.

Not only I loved this book so badly but....Do we want to talk of pictures? Wonderful! I love all these vintage pictures inserted by the author. I am a passionate of vintage pictures! pictures in general and vintage items.

It's a book this one that will let you think a lot and not just because this one is a work of fantasy but because it is connected more than we can think with our reality.

And Miss Peregrine? Who is she? She is a guardian for all these peculiar children and the one in grade to present magically to them a beautiful perennial life where no one will become adult and corrupted.

Not only: she becomes a falc peregrine when necessary.

I thought if it's correct to living secluded from the rest of the world, not joining anyone for fear of not being accepted because there are special powers while I was reading the book and to me this one is a big thematic like also the exclusion of other people considered Normals in the life of this community.


I re-discovered thanks to this book that british humor I love a lot! and that makes me laugh 'til I cry and thematic like past, present, photography, vintage, reality, monsters, after life and death seeing that after all fiction sometimes is less dangerous than reality. Sad but true, considering what it is going on in the world.

I also appreciated the beautiful, important paper with which the book is realised. I love reading books with a good quality-paper, a sign of great respect for the reader and for the author. I have had the impression that the product has been loved from the beginning to the end like Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children  has surely been.

I bought this edition at Club Per Voi the most discounted italian book club magazine by Mondolibri.



Anna Maria Polidori


he pic of the author taken from his website.