Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children starts off as a creative writing exercise for author Ransom Riggs who constructs a story around his collection of gothic found photographs. The first book in a proposed trilogy (natch) it has to do some heavy lifting to set the stage but it still proves engrossing. It's only once we get past the requisite “before” of the emo teen who hates his life and idolizes his grandfather and his fantastical stories and into the “after” of Miss Peregrine's world does the book begin to really move.

It's a likeable YA romp. I just don't know how I feel about a budding romance between Jacob and Emma, considering she was madly in love with Jacob's grandfather before him.