Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs

Ransom Riggs' debut novel is, like plenty of debut novels, a mixed bag. While he gets full marks for a unique approach (many of the characters and situations are inspired by found photographs that often detail bizarre, unlikely and impossible things), the novel relies too much on "the seemingly unremarkable boy who has Amazing Powers" trope to be fully successful.

The aforementioned boy, Jacob, has dealt the traumatic loss of his somewhat mysterious grandfather. Grandpa filled Jacob's head with impossible stories from his time at a children's home in Wales in the years after he escaped from the Nazis and his volunteering to fight against his foe. At Miss Peregrine's home there were folks with remarkable powers, from being invisible to being able to start fires with their minds.

After his grandfather's death, Jacob spirals in a deep depression, the back of his mind tickled by thought that maybe all of those stories were true. To finally settle it, Jacob and his somewhat dazed father head to a small Welsh island. There, the youth finally finds the fabled home, hidden from all to see in a time loop on one particular day during World War II. The children haven't aged physically, but have lived through the last 70 years, all under the watchful eye of their mistress.

The plot, and Jacob's own abilities, grow out of this. There's a decadent group that loves to feast on the essence of those with special talents (though any old human or animal will do in a pinch) that has forced our heroes into these hidden loops. It's pretty clear that one of these is on the island in modern times, will it find its way behind the scenes and into the succulent flesh of our heroes?

The photographs, such as a girl levitating a few inches off the ground, are all presented as found, and provide the sense of eeriness that drives the first half of the book. Once we get into the time-looped home, things move away from that into more familiar, "child hero saving us all" territory. Jacob is a good, complex and rather unlikable protagonist, but a lot of the others seem to come from either 1) quirky Welsh or 2) X-Men reject central casting. Riggs is a talented writer and I'm sure I'll at least give the inevitable sequel (this volume ends on a bit of a cliffhanger) a read, but I think it could have been so much more than what we get here.