A review by eowyns_helmet
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

5.0

I'd avoided this book for a long time (gathered dust on my night stand for a year), then picked it up only to see how Riggs handled the transition from Book 1-Book 2 ([b:Hollow City|12396528|Hollow City (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #2)|Ransom Riggs|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1381258937s/12396528.jpg|17377739]). For me the photos were a danger sign: too hipster and slick. But when I finally gave the story a chance, I loved it. Miss Peregrine pushes my buttons -- the fantastic embedded in the every day, a portal, WWII, a surprising narrative that then makes perfect sense (so much of what I read is utterly, stagnifyingly predictable), play with numbers, a bit of English fussiness within a frame of Florida weirdness, riffs on technology and time, some border-pushing sex and swearing, plucky characters who have distinctive voices, a bit of adventure... In the end, the photos (and the lush production) made the book superior, something as a kid I would have felt was pulling one over on the teachers... an immersive and delightful read.

The writing is also excellent, fresh, interesting and very vivid. It's hard to pick a section that's not a spoiler but here goes (and this section was so well done and timely that I stopped to savor it several times):

I clenched my jaw and shut my eyes and held my breath, but instead of the deafening blast I was bracing for, everything went completely, profoundly quiet. Suddenly there were no growling engines, no whistling bombs, no pops of distant guns. It was as if someone had muted the world. Was I dead? I uncovered my head and slowly looked behind me. The wind-bent boughs of trees were frozen in place. The sky was a photograph of arrested flames licking a cloud bank. Drops of rain hung suspended before my eyes. And in the middle of the circle of children, like the object of some arcane ritual, there hovered a bomb, its downward facing tip seemingly balanced on Adam's outstretched finger. Then, like a movie that burns in the projector while you're watching it, a bloom of hot and perfect whiteness spread out before me and swallowed everything.