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"'Find the bird. In the loop. On the other side of the old man's grave. September third, 1940.' I nodded, but he could see that I didn't understand. "Emerson—the letter. Tell them what happened, Yakob.'" 

Since he could remember, Jacob Portman had listened to his grandfather's stories with a sense of wonder. Grandpa Abe Portman's childhood escape from a war-ravaged Poland was the stuff of adventure, and his new "family" in a Welsh children's home, run by the enigmatic Miss Peregrine, sounded like something out of a dream. Grandpa Portman even had photo evidence of his fellow orphans—a little girl who could levitate, a scrawny boy lifting a boulder above his head, a standing suit that was supposedly supported by an invisible young man. There were even terrifying stories of the monsters on the Continent that chased Abe and children like him, intent on destroying them for being "different." 

But growing up has a way of robbing our minds of magic and belief. When a teenage Jacob decides that his Yiddish grandfather's stories were a way of explaining the terrors of the Third Reich, he throws away the once-cherished notions that he would one day be drawn into an adventure like Abe. Consigned to living a boring, Floridian existence stocking adult diapers at his mother's family drug store chain, smoking (and choking on) the occasional cigarette with his only friend, Jake has all but forgotten the honesty with which his grandfather had once revealed his frightening past. But a frantic phone call from Grandpa Portman leads Jake rushing to find the old man lying in the woods behind his home, his body torn apart by something neither animal nor human. His grandfather's cryptic last words haunt him to the point of recurring nightmares, as does the image of the ghastly figure he saw fleeing the scene that awful night... 

"Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children," by Ransom Riggs, has every element of a classic Gothic novel. Young Jake must fumble his way through wracking self-doubt to decipher obscure clues and final words left by the grandfather he hardly knew, eventually leading him to Wales in search of Miss Peregrine's orphanage and any living person who might hold answers to the secrets Abe Portman left behind. And only when he encounters these answers does he discover the frightening truth behind his grandfather's past, and the realization that whatever killed Abe may be after him, too. 

Rife with haunting photographs of the "Peculiar Children" who once inhabited (or do they still?) Miss Peregrine's home, this book reads as if one of Ann Radcliffe's plots were put into modern prose by Scott Westerfeld, making it accessible both to young adult readers and adults alike. And if you never believed the tales your granddad spun like spider webs around the crumbling photographs in his photo album, “Miss Peregrine” may have you taking a closer look... perhaps you will find something fantastic there. 

Review by Cat Connolly

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Hardcover)

By Ransom Riggs

$17.99

ISBN-13: 9781594744761
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Quirk Books, 6/2011

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