Jacob Portman is a 16-year-old boy from Florida who describes himself as "a sort-of-normal messed-up rich kid in the suburbs" (page 268).
After living through the traumatic death of his grandfather in his arms, Jacob goes on an adventure that eventually lands him in Miss Peregrine's home for peculiar children. Trapped in a time loop that resets every 24 hours, the children are kept safe in that loop from the very monsters that killed grandpa Portman.
While Jacob and the peculiar children escape from that monster, that managed to follow him as far as it could come, they will have to relocate and build a new life in the end.

This book is good for anyone who enjoys time travel, strangely different monsters, and a story that develops slowly.

I liked the peculiar children. They each had the best-developed character traits and were altogether more likeable than Jacob.

The book, written in first person (which I don't enjoy reading), follows Jacob as he describes himself and his life in Florida at first. In an attempt to include some flaw to his main character, Ransom Riggs makes him much more than "sort-of-normal messed-up." In the beginning of the book, Jacob works in a drugstore and describes how he built a giant tower of adult diapers only to tip it over when the manager points out that he used the wrong brand. Right as all of those packages are skittering over the floor, Jacob gets called away to go help out his grandfather. The problem is that this technique, designed to show a character flaw and make him more believable, makes him come across as spoiled brat whom I don't wish anything good ever to happen to. On top of that, he is described as not having any friends, except one. Gee. I wonder why.
Jacob is simply not a likeable character and while he goes through a lot of adventures throughout the book, it just never touched me because he starts out as such a toxic, unsympathetic jackass who enjoys being needlessly cruel to employees and makes fun of incontinence products that I just don't like him. Or the author who chose to write his "hero" like that.

Read a book in third person.

This book left me unsatisfied because I kept wondering the whole time when the denouement would come only to find out that the story was never meant to be finished at the end of this book.

Ransom Riggs grew up in Florida, but moved to Los Angeles where he attended the University of Southern California for film studies. He writes his books in the same way that shots or frames would be set up to create a cinematic reading experience.

I recommend this book to readers who want to take their time with a slow plot over several books (6).

I don't recommend this book to readers who want to read one book and have the whole story.

When I read this book, I did not know that it was the first of a series. At the end of the edition that I read, two more books were advertised. When I went to look it up on Amazon, I found that there are a total of six books in this series.
This book ends with too many open secrets and not enough of the plot points explained or resolved.

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Created Feb 15, 2022 at 11:43pm • Submit your own review...