Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Even though I've seen this book bandied about and raved over, I never really got the urge to pick it up until a friend let lose a bomb on my head. Eva Green will play Miss Peregrine in the upcoming Tim Burton production of this film.

So, of course, I'm now on the bandwagon and clapping together my cymbals like a wind-up monkey.

Hey! The book isn't that bad!

In fact, it's fine to entice new readers to the odd action paranormal full of "old" teenagers and one "firmly" established normal kid. As for anyone jaded by the whole market of old storytelling tropes, well yes there is a longish mild mystery filling up the first act which is mildly entertaining, but it's acts two and three that get really fun.

I think it's fair to assume that titles to books can thought of as "on the table" for spoiler comments, so here's a spoiler: There's Peculiar Children In This Book. Think X-Men. Everything else I might say that is fun, I'm going to relegate to tags in comments, because, let's face it, most of what is fun in this book is all paranormal and a bit of a simple plot that later ramps-up the action. It's all character building the rest of the time, which is perfectly fine.

It's fun. It's light. It's easy. And I see perfectly now why Tim Burton will be picking it up, because part of what I call fun and light is actually pretty creepy. Mildly creepy, anyway. But then, readers get a lot of that creepy in their regular diet, so maybe you might consider this creepy-light. Half the normal calories of a good adult horror. More buzz words. Even sheep-herders rapping. Time-traveling birds. You know: Quirk.

There are a couple of really cool scenes I can't wait to see in the movie, but there's One Thing I hope happens.

Or two. But since I can't truly hope the second will ever come to pass, I just hope that Miss Peregrine's roll gets amped up for the edification of us adult moviegoers. I mean, it's Eva Green, for Peculiar's sake!

:)

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