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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Cover of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Borrow Borrow
The #1 New York Times best-selling series.
 
Bonus features
• Q&A with author Ransom Riggs
• Eight pages of color stills from the film
• Sneak preview of Hollow City, the next novel in the series
A mysterious island.

 An abandoned orphanage.

 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. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive. 

A spine-tingling fantasy illustrated with haunting vintage photography, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children will delight adults, teens, and anyone who relishes an adventure in the shadows.
 
“A tense, moving, and wondrously strange first novel. The photographs and text work together brilliantly to create an unforgettable story.”—John Green, New York Times best-selling author of The Fault in Our Stars
 
“With its X-Men: First Class-meets-time-travel story line, David Lynchian imagery, and rich, eerie detail, it’s no wonder Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has been snapped up by Twentieth Century Fox. B+”—Entertainment Weekly
 
“‘Peculiar’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. Riggs’ chilling, wondrous novel is already headed to the movies.”—People
 
“You’ll love it if you want a good thriller for the summer. It’s a mystery, and you’ll race to solve it before Jacob figures it out for himself.”—Seventeen
The #1 New York Times best-selling series.
 
Bonus features
• Q&A with author Ransom Riggs
• Eight pages of color stills from the film
• Sneak preview of Hollow City, the next novel in the series
A mysterious island.

 An abandoned orphanage.

 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. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive. 

A spine-tingling fantasy illustrated with haunting vintage photography, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children will delight adults, teens, and anyone who relishes an adventure in the shadows.
 
“A tense, moving, and wondrously strange first novel. The photographs and text work together brilliantly to create an unforgettable story.”—John Green, New York Times best-selling author of The Fault in Our Stars
 
“With its X-Men: First Class-meets-time-travel story line, David Lynchian imagery, and rich, eerie detail, it’s no wonder Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has been snapped up by Twentieth Century Fox. B+”—Entertainment Weekly
 
“‘Peculiar’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. Riggs’ chilling, wondrous novel is already headed to the movies.”—People
 
“You’ll love it if you want a good thriller for the summer. It’s a mystery, and you’ll race to solve it before Jacob figures it out for himself.”—Seventeen
Available formats-
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB eBook
Languages:-
Copies-
  • Available:
    1
  • Library copies:
    2
Levels-
  • ATOS:
    5.7
  • Lexile:
    890
  • Interest Level:
    UG
  • Text Difficulty:
    4


 
Awards-
Excerpts-
  • From the book Prologue

    I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After. Like many of the extraordinary things to come, it involved my grandfather, Abraham Portman.
         Growing up, Grandpa Portman was the most fascinating person I knew. He had lived in an orphanage, fought in wars, crossed oceans by steamship and deserts on horseback, performed in circuses, knew everything about guns and self-defense and surviving in the wilderness, and spoke at least three languages that weren’t English. It all seemed unfathomably exotic to a kid who’d never left Florida, and I begged him to regale me with stories whenever I saw him. He always obliged, telling them like secrets that could be entrusted only to me.
         When I was six I decided that my only chance of having a life half as exciting as Grandpa Portman’s was to become an explorer. He encouraged me by spending afternoons at my side hunched over maps of the world, plotting imaginary expeditions with trails of red pushpins and telling me about the fantastic places I would discover one day. At home I made my ambitions known by parading around with a cardboard tube held to my eye, shouting, “Land ho!” and “Prepare a landing party!” until my parents shooed me outside. I think they worried that my grandfather would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I’d never recover—that these fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions—so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.
         I felt even more cheated when I realized that most of Grandpa Portman’s best stories couldn’t possibly be true. The tallest tales were always about his childhood, like how he was born in Poland but at twelve had been shipped off to a children’s home in Wales. When I would ask why he had to leave his parents, his answer was always the same: because the monsters were after him. Poland was simply rotten with them, he said.
         “What kind of monsters?” I’d ask, wide-eyed. It became a sort of routine. “Awful hunched-over ones with rotting skin and black eyes,” he’d say. “And they walked like this!” And he’d shamble after me like an old-time movie monster until I ran away laughing.
         Every time he described them he’d toss in some lurid new detail: they stank like putrefying trash; they were invisible except for their shadows; a pack of squirming tentacles lurked inside their mouths and could whip out in an instant and pull you into their powerful jaws. It wasn’t long before I had trouble falling asleep, my hyperactive imagination transforming the hiss of tires on wet pavement into labored breathing just outside my window or shadows under the door into twisting gray-black tentacles. I was scared of the monsters but thrilled to imagine my grandfather battling them and surviving to tell the tale.
         More fantastic still were his stories about life in the Welsh children’s home. It was an enchanted place, he said,...
About the Author-
  • Ransom Riggs is the author of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Quirk, 2011), a New York Times best seller, as well as its best-selling sequels Hollow City (Quirk, 2013) and Library of Souls (Quirk, 2015). He lives in Santa Monica, CA, with his wife.
Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    April 25, 2011
    Riggs's atmospheric first novel concerns 16-year-old Jacob, a tightly wound but otherwise ordinary teenager who is "unusually susceptible to nightmares, night terrors, the Creeps, the Willies, and Seeing Things That Aren't Really There." When Jacob's grandfather, Abe, a WWII veteran, is savagely murdered, Jacob has a nervous breakdown, in part because he believes that his grandfather was killed by a monster that only they could see. On his psychiatrist's advice, Jacob and his father travel from their home in Florida to Cairnholm Island off the coast of Wales, which, during the war, housed Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Abe, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, lived there before enlisting, and the mysteries of his life and death lead Jacob back to that institution. Nearly 50 unsettling vintage photographs appear throughout, forming the framework of this dark but empowering tale, as Riggs creates supernatural backstories and identities for those pictured in them (a boy crawling with bees, a girl with untamed hair carrying a chicken). It's an enjoyable, eccentric read, distinguished by well-developed characters, a believable Welsh setting, and some very creepy monsters. Ages 12–up.

  • Kirkus

    Riggs spins a gothic tale of strangely gifted children and the monsters that pursue them from a set of eerie, old trick photographs. The brutal murder of his grandfather and a glimpse of a man with a mouth full of tentacles prompts months of nightmares and psychotherapy for 15-year-old Jacob, followed by a visit to a remote Welsh island where, his grandfather had always claimed, there lived children who could fly, lift boulders and display like weird abilities. The stories turn out to be true--but Jacob discovers that he has unwittingly exposed the sheltered "peculiar spirits" (of which he turns out to be one) and their werefalcon protector to a murderous hollowgast and its shape-changing servant wight. The interspersed photographs--gathered at flea markets and from collectors--nearly all seem to have been created in the late 19th or early 20th centuries and generally feature stone-faced figures, mostly children, in inscrutable costumes and situations. They are seen floating in the air, posing with a disreputable-looking Santa, covered in bees, dressed in rags and kneeling on a bomb, among other surreal images. Though Jacob's overdeveloped back story gives the tale a slow start, the pictures add an eldritch element from the early going, and along with creepy bad guys, the author tucks in suspenseful chases and splashes of gore as he goes. He also whirls a major storm, flying bullets and a time loop into a wild climax that leaves Jacob poised for the sequel. A trilogy opener both rich and strange, if heavy at the front end. (Horror/fantasy. 12-14) COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • Library Journal

    May 15, 2011

    Sixteen-year-old Jacob Portman no longer believes the stories his grandfather told him when he was a little boy. These are obviously fairy tales about children with mysterious abilities, such as a girl who could levitate and a boy with bees inside him, and not real memories from his grandfather's childhood. Grandpa's sepia-toned photographs of his strange friends also seem fake to Jacob. However, when he gets a chance to visit the island where the stories took place, he can't resist delving into his grandfather's past. Could these odd children really have existed? VERDICT An original work that defies categorization, this first novel should appeal to readers who like quirky fantasies. Suitable for both adults and a YA audience. Riggs includes many vintage photographs that add a critical touch of the peculiar to his unusual tale.--Laurel Bliss, San Diego State Univ. Lib.

    Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • School Library Journal

    June 1, 2011

    Gr 8 Up-Sixteen-year-old Jacob, traumatized by his grandfather's sudden, violent death, travels with his father to a remote island off the coast of Wales to find the orphanage where his grandfather was sent to live to escape Nazi persecution in Poland. When he arrives, he finds much more than he bargained for: the children from his grandfather's stories are still at the orphanage, living in a time loop in 1940. The monsters that killed Jacob's grandfather are hunting for "peculiar" children, those with special talents, and the group at the orphanage is in danger. Jacob must face the possibility that he, too, has certain traits that the monsters are after and that he is being stalked by adults he trusted. This complex and suspenseful story incorporates eerie photographs of children with seemingly impossible attributes and abilities, many of whom appear as characters in the story. The mysterious photographs add to the bizarre and slightly creepy tone of the book. Jacob is a strong and believable character, though only a few of the secondary characters are fully realized. The pacing of the story is good, alternating action sequences with Jacob's discoveries of his grandfather's long-hidden secrets. Readers will find this book unique and intriguing.-Misti Tidman, formerly at Boyd County Public Library, Ashland, KY

    Copyright 2011 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • Booklist

    May 15, 2011
    On the brink of his sixteenth birthday, something terrible happens to Jacobsomething so terrible that it splits his life into two parts: Before and After. Before, he was an ordinary young man with a peculiar but doting grandfather. After, he discovers he isnt so ordinary after all. Nor are the peculiar children he meets at Miss Peregrines home. Riggs debut uses the framework of a horror novel to tell a more far-reaching tale with symbolic overtones of the Holocaust. Though the authors skill does not always match his ambitionhis pacing is particularly unevenhis premise is clever, and Jacob and the children are intriguing characters. The book is made even more intriguing by the inclusion of a number of period photographs that seem almost Victorian in character and that expand the oddness of the proceedings. An open ending suggests the possibility of a sequel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

  • John Green, New York Times best-selling author of Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns "A tense, moving, and wondrously strange first novel. The photographs and text work together brilliantly to create an unforgettable story."
  • Associated Press "Riggs deftly moves between fantasy and reality, prose and photography to create an enchanting and at times positively terrifying story."
  • Florence of Florence + The Machine "I read all of the Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children books and I loved them."
  • People "Peculiar' doesn't even begin to cover it. Riggs' chilling, wondrous novel is already headed to the movies."
  • Seventeen "You'll love it if you want a good thriller for the summer. It's a mystery, and you'll race to solve it before Jacob figures it out for himself."
  • Justine magazine "This peculiar parable is pure perfection."
  • PopSugar "One of the coolest, creepiest YA books."
  • Publishers Weekly "It's an enjoyable, eccentric read, distinguished by well-developed characters, a believable Welsh setting, and some very creepy monsters."
  • Cleveland Plain Dealer "Brace yourself for the last 70 pages of relentless, squirm-in-your-chair action. I loved every minute of it."
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