Review Detail

"The last act was to infect me with nightmares and paranoid delusions that would take years of therapy and metabolism-wrecking medications to rout out."

I did really want to like this book. I love creepy pictures and most of all I love when the creepiness is coupled with a Victorian style. Thinking back about Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar children I would have loved to enjoy it even more now that I know that Tim Burton is working on a movie about it. If there's something I love more than Victorian eerie pictures that something is undoubtedly Tim Burton. Still I prefer that I didn't know this at the time I read the book. I would have probably been biased. Needless to say I haven't enjoyed this book as much as I hoped to.

The story follows Jacob, a boy who's spent his early years idolizing his grandfather, a man full of stories to tell about his past, stories about wars, an orphanage and peculiar children who could turn invisible or who had an outworldly physical force. When Jacob is 15 he witnesses his grandfather's murder and the man's last words refer to some kind of monster who had been chasing him for ever. When Jacob starts experiencing panic attacks he is adviced by his psychiatrist to take a trip to Wales, the place in which his granpa had lived during his youth and from which all of his stories came from. This is supposed to be a way to give sense to his relative's last words. Now, Jacob, he is the usual uninteresting boy with the uninteresting life, he's got few friends and no life plans. Later on he discovers he's got da powah.

"I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was."

I'm not that bothered with tropes when they're part of a greater story but once in Wales the story seems not to go anywhere. Jacob meets the peculiars that could have been far more insteresting if they had been given a backstory and if they hadn't just been an amusing background. The romance was just cringeworthy. Miss Peregrine was the biggest disappointment of them all. They cast Eva Green to portray her in the movie and that was actually what I had in mind for her character (she also looked, in my head, just like Aunt Josephine from a Series of Unfortunate Events!). I thought she was going to be cool, tough, smart and mysterious, a female Dumbledore (don't ask, my mind does connections that not even I can explain!) but, in the end she had no peculiar traits and was just another character added to the pile. The story had all the elements to become a new favourite of mine but eventually just fell flat.

I will probably keep reading the series but I'll do it solely because of the upcoming movie. If it hadn't been a thing I probably would have given up with these books which is a shame, I've seen the author in few videos on Youtube and he seems such a nice and funny guy but this book just wasn't my jam.