This Book Could Only Have Been Improved With A Batboy

As I’ve mentioned before, when I’m trolling the bookstore for new reads (and new nerd boyfriends) there are key words I look for when reading dust jackets. These are words like “wizard,” “viking wizard,” “airship,“ and “magic orb of doom.” Is this the best method for picking out a book? Probably not. Which is why I look at the cover, too. It’s a very serious process.

This week my literary fishing yielded me an excellent choice. The title: “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” written by Ransom Riggs. I think the fact that the author sounded like a 1800’s cowboy was also a selling point. On the cover was a black and white photo of a girl dressed in a flapper-style dress… floating an inch off the ground. Peculiar indeed!

Here’s the story. Jacob, a modern day young man hears stories from his grandfather about escaping Poland before WW2. Leaving all his family behind, he went to stay at a safe house for children in Wales. Except it wasn’t just a safe house, it was a school for kids with weird abilities and powers. An invisible boy. Another with bees in his stomach. A little girl who can fly. Of course, like every obnoxious sarcastic teen, the main character doesn’t believe his grandfather, until LIFE CHANGING EVENTS force him to seek out grandpa’s alleged school of freaky tots.

Danger. Monsters. Thuggish 1940’s Welsh village folk. Other than the occasional awkward moments of teen romance between Jacob and one of the “peculiar“ girls, I thought it was an excellent story, surpassing the rather narrow framework of most young adult fiction. I liked the historical elements tied in, the attacks on the small island town by Nazi planes, the ideas of xenophobia vs. tolerance. I don’t mean to detract from the enormity of those real historical tragedies that occurred during this time period, but making Jacob’s family Jewish just added to the complexity of the work. We’ve seen over and again the Christ mythology creeping into the works of famous fantasy authors like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, so it’s interesting to finally see a character with a different religious background interacting with some fairy people. I’m probably reading too much into this idea, but whether or not Riggs intended this to be something of note, it certainly got me pondering. Let me clarify though, this is not a book about the Holocaust or Jewish culture. It’s just the story of a boy with Jewish ancestry who finds out his Holocaust surviving grandpa grew up to be a kin to Buffy the vampire slayer.

What really set the book apart though were the included pictures. Throughout the text, Riggs placed authentic vintage photos taken from various artistic collections to match characters being mentioned. Some were simply old-fashioned and creepy, and only gained greater meaning through their pairing with the novel. Some, however, were rather curious indeed, like the floating girl on the cover. Now in a world of modern photoshop, such pictures aren’t really remarkable, though Riggs insists that they haven’t been altered. Him, I believe, but what about the weirdos who shot the photos back in 1930 or whenever? Who knows. Maybe someone did have a second mouth growing out of the back of their head, or maybe there was a primordial dwarf who was so small they could fit her inside a mason jar.

If nothing else, real or not, the photos prove that people at the turn of the century were some real freakshows. For example, one picture shows two identical twin children in weird clown outfits with one pulling a rope out of the other’s mouth. Why was that photo taken? What does it mean? Is it part of a circus show? Or was Mommy and Daddy hitting the cocaine a little hard before family portrait day? Who knows? The book just goes to show you that even if magic doesn’t exist in our world, we will never lack for things that are peculiar.