The premise of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is that the author, Ransom Riggs, and his friends, collected old and bizarre photographs (up through the 1960s) in which children are seen performing some mysterious feat such as levitating. He wove his novel around a number of the old photographs. Miss Peregrine's Home was published in 2011.
It's about a teenage boy and his father, who travel to an island off the coast of Wales after the boy's grandfather's gruesome death. The grandfather had always told his family about the wonderful children's home he lived in during World War II, and the young man wants to learn if his grandfather's wild tales were true.
This book is about magic and time travel, and, of course, the old photos. Using all the old pictures is a wonderful and unique idea. I couldn't put the book down during the first half. It wasn't a creepy horror story at first, just a little nerve-wracking. But toward the end the book does get violent and does turn into a creepy horror story, and I didn't like the second half as much.
There are some unanswered questions in the book, which leads me to believe that there will probably be a sequel.
I think part of the reason I enjoyed the first half so much is that it was reminiscent of Jane Langton's 1960 children's fantasy novel The Diamond in the Window, one of all-time favorite books. In both stories, contemporary children are chasing after children from the past, trying to find out what happened to them.
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