Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

I lost count of the number of times while wandering through Barnes and Noble, I stopped and looked at this book. The cover was intriguing. The title was curious. The blurb on the back sounded decent enough. But every time, for one reason or another, I put it back. Maybe it was a subconscious warning me away. A slight fear of all those things listed above ending up not living up to expectations. After having the chance to sit down and read this, it appears my subconscious was correct.

Take away the odd photographs that are said to have inspired the story and what's left? A mediocre at best story that can't quite seem to find its focus. Is the focus supposed to be on Jacob and be a coming of age type story? Is it supposed to be time travel? Is this focus supposed to be the children in the time loop who are alive but don't really live? Is it supposed to be an adventure that focuses on the “scary” (not a word I would use to describe this book ever) kidnapping, evil beings out to take over/destroy the world? Actually I'm not sure what the scary, evil, vague enemy group really wants to do. Maybe they want to take over the universe. Or just Antartica and form their own Shangri-La. And yes, I know a book can be all of those things at once, but it can't do that when the narrative is disjointed and all over the place like it is here.

Jacob, our narrator, is supposedly sixteen. Great. A pretty normal age for a main character in a ya novel. Except that I had to keep reminding myself that he WAS 16 every couple of pages. Most of the time he read like he was 10 or 11. Maybe 12 at the oldest. On top of that, he wasn't likable. He had no charm. He was a rich kid, with rich parents, who went out of his way to whine about everything and anything. There wasn't anything to make him complex. There wasn't anything that made me thing, ok I don't like him but I can kind of see why he's acting this way. Nope. He was just a brat. The entire length of the story was just Jacob on a teeter-tottering between giving a damn or not (most of the time, the answer was not).

There was no rhyme or reason to the peculiars or why they were there, what they were doing. It was like the author had the stack of photographs on his desk and as he went through them, made up a story about each one and added it to the book. Didn't matter that it didn't flow narratively, that the photo didn't match the character age-wise or that the story itself was weak. It was more about look how creative I am, wink, wink.

I wish the there had been more and better explanations about the loops. are they all 24 hour cycles? If a loop stops working or is sealed, how does that affect real time? Does anything change? If a loop is sealed, how does another group inhabit in the future?

All of that doens't make for a good story. All it makes is a big mess.