Mrs. Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

According to Goodreads.com:

A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. And a strange collection of very curious photographs. It all waits to be discovered in  Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience

I have to say that Mrs. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was a thoroughly enjoyable young adult novel.  I had expected to enjoy it, but not like it quite as much as I did.  That was a nice surprise.  In this book Riggs has captured just the right touch of suspense and excitement.  It gave me the heebie-jeebies in all the right places, but was still fun to read. 

The characters were well developed, with a mix of personalities and motivations.  Jacob, the lead character and narrator, was fully developed, and a strong male.  I think that boys in my classes will enjoy reading a book that doesn’t seem particularly “girlie” to them, and the good thing is that Jacob has a bit of romance during the story, so that might satisfy some of the girls in my classes.

 I also really appreciated the terrific vocabulary that Jacob, the first person narrator of the novel, used.  As a teacher I felt like this book could easily be used to do a wide ranging vocabulary study.  I will say that while I didn’t find Jacob’s cursing to be personally offensive (that would be hypocritical of me) there was some .  . . language . . . as we teachers in the Coalfields of West Virginia might say to each other.  I don’t remember it to be overwhelming or frequent, but then again, I’m no judge of that. 

The plot was exciting, with one large twist that I never saw coming, and I love it when I am caught totally by surprise in a book.  The setting was intriguing, with the idea of an island so isolated from the modern world that there is no cell service and only one phone for every inhabitant to use, and that setting really enhanced the plot. 

The thing that attracted me to the book originally was the fact that throughout the book are photographs of the “peculiar” children and inhabitants of the home.  I completely enjoyed them as I read (I had an electronic version of the book, and they were very nicely done there).  What really added to my enjoyment though, was the author’s note at the end that let me know every single photograph was real, and had been picked up from various yard sales, antique stores and similar places.  Riggs even gives a list of the collectors to whom the photographs belong.  That was exciting to me, and I had to go back through and look at them all again, imagining a writing invitation given to students with a number of old pictures, asking them to create a story around them to weave the pictures together.  I’ll have to work on that some, but I’ve got an idea for my classroom perking, thanks to that bit of information. 

Overall I highly recommend Mrs. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children as a DANGEROUS BOOK.  It will be one that will make you enjoy the time you spend reading, catch student’s interest, and offer several entry points into writing practice.