It'll be hard to wait for the sequel to 'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children'

I recently finished reading an awesome book called “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” by Ransom Riggs, and I was pleasantly surprised by just how good this book was from start to finish.

Released on June 7 by Quirk Books, this book was… well… peculiar, to say the least, that is, it was very different from any other novel that I can remember reading. The thing that makes this book particularly unusual is that its plot is based on dozens of old, unusual - but authentic - photos.

The book’s main character is a teenager from Florida, who lives a humdrum life as the slacker son of well-to-do parents. His grandfather, a Jewish veteran of World War II, is killed in the woods behind his home by a creature with tentacles coming out of its mouth. His parents (and others) think that the boy has lost his mind when he tells them about the creature. After a little therapy, the son and his bird-watching/writer father go on a trip to a mysterious island off the coast of England.

The island is the home of an abandoned orphanage, where the grandfather grew up after fleeing mainland Europe’s Nazis in the days leading up to WWII. The boy eventually gets the chance to explore the old orphanage and finds a trunk full of vintage photographs, many of which he’d seen at his grandfather’s home in Florida. From there, the story goes on to involve time travel, an invisible boy, a girl who can create fire out of thin air, a giant bog, ancient tombs, shipwrecks, creepy lighthouses, etc., etc.

Riggs is a master storyteller, and I’ll be the first to admit that “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” is hard to classify. It’s probably best to call it a fantasy novel, but it also incorporates science fiction (time travel) and horror (monsters with tentacles coming out of their mouths). I’d kind of wanted to read it because I thought it might have been steampunkish, but it’s not. You won’t find any retrofuturism in a Victorian setting here and definitely no goggles, corsets or airships.

For those of you who enjoyed the book, you’ll be pleased to hear that Riggs has announced on his Web site, www.ransomriggs.com, that he is working on a sequel. Fox Motion Pictures has also bought the movie rights to the book, and according to the Internet Movie Database, the film version is slated for release sometime in 2013.

Other books by Riggs include the following titles:

- 13 Photographs that Changed the World

- The Sherlock Holmes Handbook: The Methods and Mysteries of the World’s Greatest Detective

- Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho

- Scatterbrained

- The Mind of Allen Ginsberg

- In the Beginning

- Talking Pictures

- Strange Geographies: Travel Essays with a Twist

In the end, I really enjoyed this book and I look forward to reading Riggs’ other books. How many of you out there have read “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” or any of Riggs’ other books? What did you think about them? Which did you like or dislike and why? Let us know in the comments section below.