Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

I admit, the cover sold me.  It popped up on Amazon while I was browsing (probably reading book reviews on books I read ten years ago).  It was a new book, marketed as "young adult" fiction, of which I'm always skeptical.  I read the synopsis, avoided all the reviews, and was sold as soon as I found out that the novel was illustrated with quirky vintage photography.

What a surprisingly fun book!  It is well written, almost TOO well-written for the audience to which it is being sold.  But that only made it better for me.  The characters are children in body but adult in mind, and that gives them depth.  There are strange photos aplenty which, rather than detracting from the story, enhance it by bringing the characters to life.  And the story itself was enough to keep me reading, with or without the photos.

This book has everything:  Family dynamics, travel, World War II, circus freaks (or, rather, people with peculiarities), romance, time travel, and photography.  What's not to love?  Nothing!  And supposedly there's a sequel in the works... with more photos.

Hooray for a new addiction!

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Oh, how I'd been wanting to read this book for simply ages!  My reading list is long enough to take me through the rest of my life, but sometimes I must prioritize books in order to remain on top of pop culture.  When I saw that the movie was coming out soon, this one jumped to the top of the list.

The first thing I noticed was the one and only review quote on the front of my paperback edition: "This could be one of the most important pieces of fiction since To Kill a Mockingbird... If you read only one book... let this be it." - NPR.org.  That's a pretty serious statement, so off I went.  I read this book almost entirely in one day, the Monday following Hurricane Irene, in fact.  The power was out at both my house and at work, so I had the day off.  I read until the sun went down.  I finished the last few pages with a flashlight.

At first I thought it was a bit presumptuous for NPR to compare this book to one of my favorite books of all time.  Had it been published at the same time as To Kill a Mockingbird, I thought, it might have been more timely.  I expressed this opinion to a friend, who reminded me that timeliness, as I define it, is irrelevant - as time goes on, we tend to forget lessons we've learned in the past.  A book like this is important because it reminds us of past evil.  The only way to prevent future evil is to keep the past in our minds.  We all know that history repeats itself, and a book like this could hopefully keep us from returning to the Miss Hilly mindset.

I have absolutely nothing bad to say about this book.  My only nit-picking detail is chapter 25:  She writes every other chapter in the voice of one of the main characters, but she writes the benefit in a never-before-or-again-seen omniscient voice.  It really broke up the flow of the story for me, and I think she could have just as effectively written it from the voice of one of the "help", and it would have kept the voices consistent.

Other than that, though, this story is put together quite beautifully.  You won't regret reading it, and you won't forget it for a long time to come.  Read it!