Book #89: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Title: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Author: Ransom Riggs

I feel a little bit bad that I don't remember this book better, but I guess that also tells you how much I liked it. It was okay-- not so bad that I wanted to throw it across the room, but not so good that I'm eager to read the next installment in the series. In fact, it felt like Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children was more about setting up a series than it was a stand-alone book on its own. I hate books like that. I'd rather read a "stand-alone with series potential" than a book in a series (that said, most of the books I've finished but haven't reviewed so far are the middle books in series where I've never read the first books.

Anyway, back to the book at hand. Miss Peregrine's Home... is about a kid whose name I don't remember (see?) whose grandpa dies under mysterious circumstances. The kid is pretty messed up after finding Grandpa dead, so his dad agrees him to take him to Wales to find the orphanage where Grandpa grew up. Once the kid gets there, lots of weird things start to happen and he discovers that his grandpa, and the kids he grew up with, are all "peculiar" (a fact that the grandfather tried to teach the kid without much success while he was alive). Worse still, the kid himself starts to realize that he may also be peculiar, that bad guys want to destroy these peculiar kids, and that the kid may have brought the danger with him.

I though the chapters in South Florida (where the book begins) were strongest-- they reminded me of Carl Hiassen or Dave Barry. But overall, the book just didn't move me. I think my kids might like it, though.