27th May 2023

The second book of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children follows immediately on from the end of the first, and is an action-packed adventure across 1940s Britain as the children race to save their mentor.

There’s no real recap of the first novel, so it took a while for my head to catch back up with some of what was going on, but in some respects that doesn’t matter as the pace is fast and it’s easy to get caught up in that.

It definitely shows through that this is a book built around the found photographs which feature throughout (and are likely the reason for the really high quality of the paper and printing - which ends up making this a really heavy book), and yet I think that’s a strong part of what makes the narrative move so compellingly.

I was thinking early on that I probably would stop after this book, but now I’m considering again whether to look out for book three.

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9th February 2020

I picked up a really nice, surprisingly heavy, hardback edition of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children from a charity shop, and was surprised to find I was reading a story with great similarity to the film based upon it.

It’s the story of a boy who doesn’t believe his grandfather’s stories of monsters and peculiar friends, but when he sees one, he sets of on an adventure to find out more about his ancestor’s youth.

It’s a good fun story, mysterious and fantastical, and punctuated by peculiar photographs (which the author reveals at the end are all authentic vintage pictures which inspired the story).

What I found most startling though was how closely the filmmakers followed the story. This was a bit distracting actually, as it meant the images in my head were of the actors. Until suddenly the stories divided, and the book went somewhere else entirely.

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