Book: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

So you take Professor Charles Xavier's School for the Gifted, you mix in a little World War II flavoring, a dash of generic YA lit, and a healthy sprinkling of gimmickry, bake it all together for 350 pages, and hope it tastes good, because you're really hoping you get a book series out of it. 

I feel like that must have been the recipe Ransom Riggs (no way that's a real name) was following in creating this novel. Though the book has plenty of bits and pieces that I like as ideas, it leans far too heavily on the "found photographs" shtick, and when that loses energy and reveals itself to be a bit of an empty contrivance, the book doesn't quite follow through with enough story to really pull me in. Trying to fit in these pictures, which clearly are forced on the story in ways that work well at time and work poorly at times, just doesn't really take the book anywhere interesting. None of the characters really seem developed beyond the two-dimensional images we are presented with, and Riggs, in preparing the way for future books in the series, leaves off with an anti-climactic climax. Even Jacob seems like a relatively uninteresting character, his battle with psychological demons not particularly well drawn. When your first person narrator is, well, boring, with clear motivations but a bland interior life, I think there's a problem.

Good YA is hard to do well for me. It's really not my genre of choice. And Riggs isn't doing it badly because there are a lot of fun ideas here (the young X-men, the time travel element, etc.) even if a lot of it is recycled. But there's not a lot here that excites me either. Frankly, I'd rather go read more good X-Men comics, like those written by Joss Whedon or Chris Claremont. They knew how to blend the "peculiar" with real psychology in interesting ways. Riggs tries hard, but doesn't really pull it off for me. 

Grade: D+