Reviews with content warning for Xenophobia - Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Reviews tagging 'Xenophobia'

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

7 reviews

guinness74's review against another edition

adventurous emotional hopeful mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Charming and enjoyable. Just what I needed in my timeline of books. It’s not what you would expect, which made it even more enjoyable.

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euhfubeuh's review against another edition

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adventurous dark funny lighthearted tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Miss Peregrine’s Home is a creepily fun and historical spin on school of gifted children trope. The characters are all fun, fiery, and quirky, and obviously I’m a bit biased to Emma. The collection of photos that is iconic for the series is a great addition to make the story even more immersive, knowing that Riggs collected most of them from Abandoned buildings and edited them to fit the story makes them all the more chilling.

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fieldsandfeels's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional funny inspiring mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

I know this one was super popular a while back, but it really took me by surprise how invested I became in these children. I expected much darker, but instead they are a lovely little found family with a lot of heart and incredible capability. I’m such a sucker for a found family. I will continue to follow this little family on their adventures for sure!

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erebus53's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

I tried to pick up a copy of this one as a graphic novel, as it was listed as on the shelves (at Christchurch South Library), but an unhelpful librarian refuse to help me track it down after I had flipped through everything on the shelves and come up wanting.. so I threw up my arms in agitation and just downloaded the audiobook. It was probably a wise decision in the long run.

The story focuses on a teen who is brought up in Florida and who has a close relationship with his Jewish grandfather who survived WWII. The man tells him fanciful stories and and shows him photographs of a children's home where he was raised with kids with special powers. The photographs look fake and a bit dodgy, so nobody believes his stories of special powers and monsters, assuming that they are the mentally divergent accommodations of a traumatised holocaust survivor. As the old man gets increasingly paranoid and the family are considering putting him in a care facility, his grandson goes to check on him, only to find that one of the monsters has got him.

Once his therapist okays the trip, he follows a set of clues in his grandfather's last words, and he travels with his father to a remote island in the UK where his father wishes to observe the local birdlife. There he puts together a puzzle that brings him into contact with people his grandfather once knew, and entangles him in further adventure.

Being set in Florida I notice that there is quite a bit of narrative about the treatment of the elderly. There is a focus on listening to the opinions of older people, and the ways that they are treated in society (there are a lot of rest homes and retirees in Florida, so this follows). I also encountered the term "lenai" for the first time. Intuiting that it was a type of verandah, I looked it up and realised that this common feature of houses in tropical climes was not unknown to me.. my Uncle has one similar to the pictures that I see in an internet web-search, and he lives in Australia.

The story is interesting, deals with alternate timelines and portals, and has a little bit of teen kissing, secret monsters, shape changers, levitating and snorkelling, and some stuff with common or garden necromancy, scary monsters, and sheep poo. This is the first part of a bigger story so it's not surprising that the end of it is a bit of a cliffhanger. I'd like to know what happens next.

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