Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Ransom Riggs, 2011
Fantasy Young adultMystery, thriller & crimeContemporary fiction
A boy raised on his grandfather’s monster stories follows a trail of strange photographs to a ruined children’s home—and the peculiar children who might be real. A slow gothic drift through old photographs, family stories and wartime dread, with moments of strange wonder.
Feels like dread and wonder. About memory, family and war.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy eerie family mysteries told through old photographs and a hesitant teenage voice. The gothic horror imagery and wartime family loss are heavy, so it may not suit you if you want a lighter read.
Why read it
It offers a haunted photo-album mystery about memory, family and the monsters history leaves behind.
A page from the book
The monsters that shaped a childhood were not the ones with tentacles.
My grandfather was the only member of his family to escape Poland before the Second World War broke out. He was twelve years old when his parents sent him into the arms of strangers, putting their youngest son on a train to Britain with nothing more than a suitcase and the clothes on his back. It was a one-way ticket. He never saw his mother or father again, or his older brothers, his cousins, his aunts and uncles. Each one would be dead before his sixteenth birthday, killed by the monsters he had so narrowly escaped. But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late. Ransom Riggs.Ransom Riggs built the novel around vintage found photographs he collected at flea markets, writing scenes to explain their uncanny subjects.
Books that feel like this
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- Is Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy eerie family mysteries told through old photographs and a hesitant teenage voice. The gothic horror imagery and wartime family loss are heavy, so it may not suit you if you want a lighter read.
- What is Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children like?
- A slow gothic drift through old photographs, family stories and wartime dread, with moments of strange wonder. Feels like dread and wonder. About memory, family and war.
- What should I read after Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children?
- If you liked Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, try Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka), Running with Scissors (Augusten Burroughs) and Ready Player One (Ernest Cline).
A taste of the feed
What still proves a person is human when the body says otherwise.
Was he an animal if music could captivate him so? It seemed to him that he was being shown the way to the unknown nourishment he had been yearning for. He was determined to make his way forward to his sister and tug at her skirt to show her she might come into his room with her violin, as no-one appreciated her playing here as much as he would.
Metamorphosis · Franz Kafka
What a parent's accent does to the shape of a sentence.
My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron. Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.
Running with Scissors · Augusten Burroughs
What a sitcom family can give a kid who has none.
Sitting alone in the dark, watching the show on my laptop, I always found myself imagining that I lived in that warm, well-lit house, and that those smiling, understanding people were my family. That there was nothing so wrong in the world that we couldn’t sort it out by the end of a single half-hour episode (or maybe a two-parter, if it was something really serious).
Ready Player One · Ernest Cline
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed