Review-Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

This book hit shelves two years ago, and it seemed to just explode.  If someone hadn't read it they wanted to read it, and I was no exception.  Of course because of my crazy reading life it got pushed to the side, but when I saw Ransom was coming back to my city this year for the sequel I decided I needed to read it.  I had actually started it in a store one day while waiting for my grandma to finish her shopping, but then I put it back on the shelf and didn't pick it back up. From what I had read I thought I would enjoy it, and I was right, although I didn't LOVE it.  There were several good parts of the book, first off was the pictures.  YA books don't have pictures in them (well, a FEW do, but not many), and these pictures were rather creepy.  I love creepy things, and despite paging through the book when I bought it I forced myself not to re-look at any of the pictures before I came to them in the text.  The second thing I liked was the story.  It was really inventive.  Sure, none of the ideas are 100% unique, but what idea is now a days?  It's all in how you string your ideas together that makes them different, and Ransom did that very well.  The other huge thing I found pretty great was the setting of part of the book (that will make sense when you read the book).  I'm a huge fan of WWII, and there seem to be a lack of books set in that time (in the YA age group) so this was a nice surprise when I found out about it, granted it's not a HUGE part of the book.  All of this being said the one small problem I had with the book was that it felt like the story progressed very slowly.  Something would happen, and it would be exciting, but then several dozen pages would go by and nothing of huge significance would occur.  I feel like there were several parts that could have been cut out and the story could have still continued uninterrupted.  That said it was an enjoyable novel with interesting pictures and characters that were a lot of fun.  I'm eager to see where Ransom goes with this story in the second and third (Ransom confirmed there will be a third book in the series) books.  There's potential for a story-line that could be even creepier than the one in this book.

4/5 dust spirits