Ransom Riggs’ “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”: A Book Review
By: Linda Chau, Cullen Long, & Samantha Green
“Stay peculiar”
As you read the opening pages of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, you are thrown into a world of tragedy, mystery, danger, and of course, peculiarity. The story follows the journey of sixteen-year-old Jacob Magellan Portman, as he embarks on an adventure larger than he could have ever imagined. Finding himself thrown into the island of Peculiars, Jacob encounters a world full of children, monsters, and mystery. Peculiars are a type of people that have not one soul, but two. The second soul begins to manifest itself, causing unique abilities and skills. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children opens up the world of what it truly means to be peculiar. The reader experiences this world through a combination of the written word and a series of vintage found photos, gathered by the book’s author, Ransom Riggs.
For the reader who enjoys action, fantasy, and danger, step into the world of Peculiars and don’t look back!
Unfolding the Story of the Peculiars
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a young-adult novel filled with fantastical elements. It follows the adventures of Jacob Magallan Portman, a young teenager determined to resolve doubts about his grandfather’s untimely death. Growing up, Jacob enjoyed listening to his grandfather tell him stories about his experience as a soldier in World War II. These were no ordinary tales about the brave marching and fighting on the battlefield, however. The stories that Abraham “Abe” Portman shared with Jacob described his unusual encounters with mythical creatures. These creatures, hollowgasts and wights, could disguise themselves as humans to devour humans, notably, peculiars. Peculiars are human beings who have extraordinary skills or abilities. Despite being shown pictures of peculiars by his grandfather, however, Jacob initially refused to believe that this other world existed.
Only after witnessing a monster on the night of his grandfather’s murder does Jacob begin to realize the truth behind his grandfather’s stories. The death of Abe was difficult on Jacob, as he began to have nightmares of the death and visions of hollows. To validate the truth of his grandfather’s stories, Jacob plans a trip to Cairnholm, the fictional Welsh island described by Abe. Jacob’s parents are initially reluctant to agree to this trip, out of concern for their son’s mental health. However, upon insistence from Dr. Golan, a visiting psychiatrist, Jacob and his father travel to the island.
The more Jacob explores Cairnholm, the more he finds himself in the footsteps of his grandfather. He encounters the children’s home that Abe grew up in. After making several visits to this building, meeting new peculiars along the way, Jacob learns that the island is under attack by the hollowgasts and wights. Once perceived as a healing experience for Jacob, the trip quickly turns to a perilous escape journey for Jacob and his friends.
The photographs that Riggs has included portray a modest living situation in a Victorian era, with historical overtones of World War 2. The only means of communication on the seemingly closed-off island is a single telephone. First Abe — and now Jacob — and the peculiars have to rely on their gut instincts and guidance from their ward, Miss Peregrine, to determine how to stay alive.
Ransom Who?
Ransom Riggs is best known as the author of the trilogy for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. With guidance from director Tim Burton, the first installment was turned into a movie.
Since childhood, Riggs was interested in film, experimenting with a half-broken video camera in his back yard and bedroom with his friends. After attending the film school at the University of Southern California, Riggs set out for a career in film. Despite his best attempts at producing screenplays, however, he was not successful enough. Simultaneously, he was a daily blogger for mentalfloss.com and contributor to their magazine. His potential for writing good stories was realized by Quirk Books, who asked him to write a book about Sherlock Holmes for them. With his love for vintage photos and travels to the unknown, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was born.
In the video below, Ransom Riggs speaks about his sources of inspiration and his love for using found vintage photos in his stories.
After Miss Perigrine’s, Riggs continued the story of the Jacob and the peculiars with the books The Hollow City and Library of Souls. Tales of the Peculiars explores more of the world the Peculiars venture into. Riggs has also written The Sherlock Holmes Handbook and Talking Pictures: Images and Messages Rescued from the Past. If you enjoy exploring the unknown, admiring old snapshots, or picturing yourself in the Victorian era, then Riggs’ works are must-reads!
Critical Reception
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was published on June 7, 2011 and debuted at number seven on the New York Times best-seller list. If you went to your local bookstore in search for this novel, it would be located in the Young Adult section. However, that is not what Ransom Riggs had in mind when he was writing the book:
“Miss Peregrine” was not conceived or composed with a young-adult audience in mind, but its central premise — about people who are “peculiar” in various ways and must struggle not only to survive, but also to save the clueless rest of humanity from violent evildoers — is certainly adolescent-friendly.”
While speaking to the head of sales at Quirk Books, Ransom’s publishing agency, a debate about selling the book in the adult section versus the young adult section occurred. A decision was made to market the book to young adults because the protagonist was a sixteen-year-old boy. After this decision was made, however, the book ran into some roadblocks when marketed to a younger audience. The black and white cover, as well as gray-scale photos throughout the story, seemed to turn some children away. The book did, however, begin growing a strong following among adults, who found that the creepy, fantasy world that Riggs created resonated with them. Today the book has an audience among both young-adults and adults.
Photography and Text/Photo Techniques Throughout the Novel
“I love them because they’re beautiful photographs of horrible things”
— Ransom Riggs, talking about using vintage photographs for inspiration
Meet the Peculiars
Photographs play an especially important role in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, often serving as a formal introduction point for the major characters. Several of the peculiar children are introduced to Jacob by his grandfather, who tells him stories of children with strange abilities who lived on a small island in Wales under the care of a bird. To accompany the tales, Jacob’s grandfather offers photos of some of these children; an invisible boy, a girl who floats, a face painted on the back of a head, and a boy lifting a huge rock.
In each chapter, photos are used as an introduction to new characters, or as a way to illustrate important points in the story. The latter technique is used in an especially effective manner towards the end of the book, when a major plot twist is revealed.
Meet Emma
Perhaps one of the most notable instances where photo and text are used to complement each other is when Jacob first meets Emma, one of the more important peculiar children, in person. Unbeknownst to Jacob, she had a long history with his grandfather, a relationship that ultimately influences events throughout the novel. On the page of Emma’s introduction, Jacob looks up at the faces of several children, whom he recognizes from old photos he’s seen, and takes note of one girl in particular:
“The girl who’d spoken stood up to get a better look at me. In her hands she held a flickering light, which wasn’t a lantern or a candle but seemed to be a ball of raw flame, attended by nothing more than her bare skin. I’d seen her picture not five minutes earlier, and in it she looked much the same as she did now, even cradling the same strange light between her hands.”
On the next page, the reader is treated to the photo, a stark black and white photo of a girl, the flame in her hands the only source of light.
Meet Your Villains
At points when Jacob is forced to confront wights and hollowgasts, the villains of the book, pages are dedicated to their depictions. After the death of his grandfather at the hands of a strange creature, a police sketch artist stops by to humor Jacob with a drawing of what the reader will later learn is a hollowgast. As Jacob — and the reader — learn about the lore of the world of Miss Peregrine, and the other threat faced in the form of wights, a number of photos are included to show notable examples of the creatures, including one disguised as a rather ominous-looking Santa Claus.
Photography in Riggs’ Writing Process
Riggs has described his writing process for Miss Peregrine as beginning with his avid interest in collecting vintage photos. In an interview, Riggs said that the photos that most captured his imagination were always those of children: “I noticed that among the photos I found, the strangest and most intriguing ones were always of children.” These photos, lacking any information or context, piqued his curiosity and inspired him to create stories behind the strange portraits.
Riggs’ method for including these photos is unconventional, as he tends to group photos together at various points in the story, in lieu of spacing them out more. In the text, whenever a new character — typically Miss Peregrine or her peculiar children — appears in conversation, photos of the newcomers will crop up within a page or two.
What Writers Can Learn from Riggs’ Book
What the observant writer can learn from Riggs’ writing approach is, first and foremost, that inspiration can often come from the least likely of places. In Riggs’ case, a series of novels sprang forth from a hobby of collecting old photographs.
The video below, a promotion for Riggs’ 2012 book, Taking Pictures, gives insight on this hobby.
This isn’t to say that the prospective writer needs to go out and copy Riggs’ approach — though there’s no harm in trying it on for size. What is really important for writers is to have an awareness of the world around them, and an ability to pick out interesting or useful details that can be incorporated into their work.
When writing with photographs, though, the temptation to use them in lieu of giving thorough descriptions in the work can be strong. What Riggs did particularly well in Miss Peregrine when incorporating photos was to use photographs as an added illustration to emphasize or solidify descriptions that had previously been given. Unlike works where authors may have incorporated photos ahead of the accompanying text, Riggs allows his reader to form an image in their mind first, and leaves the photo to fill in the details. In this way, his photos serve as a means of further engaging the reader in the work.
If you are ready to enter the world of fantasy and peculiarity, pick up a copy of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs today!
