Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children: Book 1

PERSONAL RESPONSE:

I have had this book on TBR (to be read) list for quite a while, it always seemed to escape being at the top though. This situation was rectified by Hunter Library’s practice of lending out Kindle E-Readers that are pre-loaded with an assortment of best sellers and classics. When I picked up one of the Kindles from the circulation desk and found this title listed I decided that it was kismet and I set myself a goal of reading it, finally.

The book was good, not spectacular, but good. I liked the writing style and voice of the author, I liked that the protagonist is male, and I liked the range of vocabulary (which gives my brain something to chew on while I read). While all of these things should have added up to a great reading experience I wasn’t completely sold on the book series. I’m not going to rush around trying to find copies of the rest of the sequels. I am unable to really put my finger on why, though the wibble-wobble-flip-flop-basketcaseness of the protagonist probably has a lot to do with it!

SUMMARY:

We open on the typical day of young Jacob Portman, at work in one of his family’s Florida drugstores, doing his level best to get fired. He complains about being a rich, young, white boy. He complains about his parents and their reaction to his grandfathers encroaching dementia. All mentally.

When Jacob receives a phone call from his grandfather he leaves work early after mentally reflecting on his many memories of his grandfather’s entertaining stories about his past. Grandpa Portman told young Jacob many stories about fighting monsters, escaping them on a sunny paradise of an island as a boy. Jacob’s father explains to Jacob that his grandpa fought in WW2, and was the only surviving member of his very large Jewish family after the Holocaust. We then flash forward to Jacob arriving to find his grandpa dying in the woods behind his house, giving him very mangled instructions, his dying words to tell Jacob how to be safe. Jacob spies the face of a monster in the underbrush after his grandpa dies in his arms, one of the monsters from Grandpa Portman’s stories. No one believes him, he has months of terrible nightmares, he is put under the care of a Psychiatrist. At his birthday party a few months after the event he is given a book from his grandpa’s desk by an aunt, in the book is a letter from a Miss Peregrine. This brings back Grandpa Portman’s dying words, his instructions to “Find the bird, beyond the old man’s grave, Letter, Emmerson“, so he decides to journey to the small island off the coast of Wales that the letter is from. With the support of his Psychiatrist. He and his dad go, spend three weeks, and Jacob’s world is turned sideways.

On this island he meets Emma, journey’s through the cairn for a “bog man” into a time loop. Where Miss Peregrine is the keeper for a group or peculiar children, Emma is one of these children. They are all roughly the same age as Jacob, and they live the same day over and over again, never aging, never dying, and always hunted by monsters. For we find that the monsters that Grandpa Portman fought were not Nazis after all, but really monsters, the Hollowgast. The Hollowgast used to be Peculiars (or syndrigast as they call themselves in Welsh), until they got too greedy for power and destroyed themselves in a giant explosion in Siberia (sound familiar? we called it an asteroid, apparently it was an experiment gone wrong). Now they haunt the earth searching for more syndrigast to kill, drink their blood, and consume the powers that make them “peculiar” so that they can come back to life.

Action ensues, kidnapping, hollows show up, more action ensues, teenagers ignore the instructions of adults, catastrophe follows, consequences are faced. This book sets up the world and the conflict that is played out in the rest of the series.

THEORY:

I would find it difficult to use this book in a classroom, middle grades, secondary, or higher ed, I don’t think that I could sift through the great elements that failed to make a great story and find anything that I could use. I am probably being very defeatist in this, but I think that if a book fails to capture the reader (and I am an easily captured reader) then it will be difficult to make it educational in a meaningful manner.