Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

I am always reluctant to buy a book surrounded by a lot of hype.  For whatever reason, my reading tastes rarely gel with those of the general public.  Not that I am a snob.  I read everything, and I do mean everything, and if it’s good, I have no problem admitting it, no matter its source.  It just seems that if there’s a great new book bandwagon rolling through and everyone is jumping on it, it usually turns out not to be my thing.  

So why I was even bothering to browse those stupid “Best of Summer” book lists, I don’t know.  I thought that by avoiding the ones with the words “Beach Read” in the title, I might accidentally stumble across some good new books.  It could happen, right?   

One book kept showing up on list after list:  Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.  I went from site to site, reading reviews of ARCs.  Shockingly, I found myself getting pretty amped up.  I couldn’t believe the things I was reading about this book!  A  mysterious, slightly sinister English orphanage?  Monsters?  Creepy, vintage photos?  Time travel?  Peculiar effing children?!  Yes, please, and I’ll take seconds.  Reviews with quotes like “YA-Adult hybrid,” “great style,” and “wildly unique” conjured visions of a modernized take on the old-timey illustrated story book with prose reminiscent of Kelly Link.  A rare genre-bender of the best kind!  I marked the release date on my calendar and pre-ordered.  I was excited.  I got into it.

Straight out of the box, Peculiar Children did not disappoint.  One of the aforementioned creepy photos graced the cover.  A morbid young lass seems to stand there, posture stiff and formal as one would expect from a lady of class posing for a portrait at a time when they were prohibitively expensive, and the slightest move could ruin everything.  You don’t really notice the empty space between the floor and her feet right away.  You do get that hair-raising feeling that something is off and will likely stare at the photo for quite a while.  The words “peculiar children” in the title are written in a somehow disturbing child’s scrawl, perhaps by a little one locked in a box for days on end who was lucky enough to find a scrap of pencil in one of the corners of his or her coffin.  Box, I mean, box.  Anyway, a quick flip through reveals a series of incongruent images, ranging from a set of twins that will give you nightmares to a young man and woman lying peacefully on the grass as if at a picnic.  You begin to wonder what kind of crazy story you’ve gotten yourself into.  Excellent stuff, yes?  I dove right in.

And at once found the water far too shallow.  Despite the buzz about Peculiar Children being a unique hybrid for teens, tweens, and adults, the craziest little story you’ve ever read, and something sparkling and brand new, it is obvious by page ten that it is not the intention of this book to break new ground, but instead to become the Next Big YA Success Story.  It follows every step in the formula – Misunderstood Teen with Parents Who Just Don’t Get It meets The One, and after many Trials and Tribulations, Misunderstood Teen Saves the World.  Well, it doesn’t follow every step in the formula, because if it did, there would be nothing to write about in the inevitable sequels.  You see, by the last ten pages of PC, it is painfully obvious that this is the first of what I’m going to guess will be the Ubiquitous YA Trilogy.    

It’s not all horrible, though.  The concept itself is wildly unique.  If something similar exists, I haven’t read or heard about it. Peculiar Children earns some points for that alone.  I’m sure there is some science fiction short or novel or something out there that this will eventually be compared to (I’ve already read a review that cited “X-Men” as similar, and while I can see it, I don’t think it’s truly apt), but for me, the concept was refreshing and so very, very full of promise. 

The story revolves around a family secret, held by the curmudgeonly but lovable Grandpa Portman.  This secret is passed on to our hero, grandson Jacob Portman, while sitting at Grandpa Portman’s knee.  Stories of an orphanage run by a bird, of monsters, of war.  The stories go over like rainbows when Jacob is a little boy, but as he grows older and more jaded, he begins to doubt.  So he consults his father, Grandpa Portman’s son, who feeds him some tragically convenient facts (Grandpa Portman is a Jew whose entire family was killed in the Holocaust, and the trauma seems to have left him a little nuts, seeing monsters at every turn), and Jacob no longer believes.  He still idolizes Grandpa Portman, but the talk of monsters and peculiar children now seem only the sad coping mechanisms of a man exposed to horrors outside anything most of us could dare to imagine.  

When Jacob gets a call from Grandpa Portman that the monsters are coming, he simply writes it off as another episode of Grandpa’s developing dementia.  By the time Jacob reaches him, Grandpa Portman is mutilated and near death.  He dies in Jacob’s arms, using his last breaths to pass a cryptic, coded clue to Jacob, leading his grandson first to a therapist, then to a nearly primitive island off the coast of Wales, and finally down the path that leads to Grandpa Portman’s history.  

The problem with Peculiar Children lies not with the story itself, but with the storytelling. Ransom Riggs, according to his bio, more frequently writes non-fiction and makes films.  I am not knocking either of these noble pursuits, but his more extensive experience in these media show in his writing.  There is little to no character development in Peculiar Children, though extremely tantalizing glimpses of several characters’ back-stories manage to burst through.  Foreshadows and clues are dropped in like product placement, with Riggs all but using little arrows off to the side to point them out to you.  In these ways especially, the book reads like a screenplay, with one scene leading to another then to another with no real time to explore the one you just left.  In a film, the visual aspect can fill in a lot of gaps in a short period of time.  You can see the actor’s expressions, hear the tones of their voices, see the shadows playing along the walls, feel the change in moods from the darkening or falling off of the music.  In good movies, these occur so subtly as to almost be subliminal.  In works of fiction, it is up to the author to provide all these subtleties, and, once again, in the good ones they go just as unnoticed as they do in a darkened theater.   Unfortunately, there is nothing subtle about Peculiar Children.  In a book with such an articulate teen as its protagonist, I wish the author had trusted his readers, young or old, to pick up certain things without having to be beat over the head with them.

Despite the almost frantic pacing to get from one thing to the next and the heavy-handed prose, or perhaps because of these things, the reader never really cares, never really holds their breath.  To some degree, everything is handed to you on a silver platter, killing any possibility of tension or suspense.  I find this particularly tragic, because the idea of Peculiar Children in another writer’s hands could have been spectacular.  Utterly spectacular.  It almost weep to think what someone like Neil Gaiman or Stephen King could have done with this.

That’s not to say that there aren’t moments where the prose doesn’t live up to the story’s potential.  Riggs’ descriptions of the orphanage, for instance, are lovely.  He uses some truly stunning metaphors and imagery.  The one moment we get from Jacob’s father showing us what’s going on inside his head and heart is quite moving, but it starts and stops so abruptly it feels out of place and, like so many other crucial moments, added at the last minute just to move the story along.  The vague suggestions about Grandpa Portman in the past are fascinating, so much so that I found myself wanting to read his story more than the one unfolding in the pages of Peculiar Children.  As any writer will tell you, that kind of disconnection with your reader is a bad, bad thing.  For all the magic and mystery going on in Peculiar Children, the writing captures none of it.  The entire adventure comes off about as interesting as my morning commute.

At the end of the day, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children should have been a tale in league with  Harry Potter or the Hunger Games, a haunting journey the reader would relish, would look forward to continuing, and would be all sorts of depressed to see end.  As it is, Peculiar Children simply isn’t quite peculiar enough to live up to its promise.  And it’s a damn shame, because it’s all there.  Re-reading the marketing for it still gives me a little tingle of joy.  Ah, well, maybe in book two.  I really think Mr. Riggs could do it if he, or his publisher, stopped trying so hard.  I’m holding my thumbs, but I will let many, many others test the water on the next one before jumping in.  As those wise men Public Enemy once said, “Don’t believe the hype!”

My grade:  C-