Author: Ransom Riggs
Number of pages: 352
Genre: Young Adult/Fiction/Paranormal
Jacob Portman never really felt normal. He grew up with his grandfather telling him stories of his childhood and showing him peculiar pictures of children doing out of the ordinary things. A girl levitating, a scrawny boy holding up a boulder, a child with no head and a boy with bees crawling all over him. His grandfather told him of a spectacular place so cheery and happy and magical guarded by "The Bird". His grandfather had grown up in the time of WWII and was an orphan on an island in Whales. As Jacob had grown older and told his grandfather he didn't believe in that stuff anymore, his grandfather slowly slipped into dementia, or so he thought. While working at Smart Aid (a pharmacy his family owns a chain all around the world of) he gets a strange call from his grandfather freaking out and figures he hasn't taken his pills, going to make sure he's okay Jacob gets a strange sensation something is wrong. When he gets there his grandfather's house is torn apart and Jacob rushes outside to the woods where he finds his grandfather almost dead. As he tries to help him his grandfather's last words haunt him. He looks up to see what he thinks is a creature, an evil creature from his nightmares of stories told long ago by Grandpa Portman.
As Jacob slips into depression his parents bring him to a psychiatrist. Jacob slowly starts to get better but can't make sense of his grandfather's last words. He starts to give up until his birthday when part of his grandfather's words come together in a letter he finds from a woman named Miss Peregrine. Jacob convinces his parents to go on a trip to Whales on the island his grandfather grew up on to try to find the truth. What he finds there though brings everything to a new perspective and he soon makes sense of the tales his grandfather told and the people he finds, that are not just fantasy.
I really liked this book I really wanted to read it the second I read the description and had been waiting to get it all summer. I thought it would be much different from what it was, more like a shutter island book rather than a refugee for extraordinary people even though that's what the cover entails. I would give this a 5 out of 5 stars with the exception that it most definitely needs a sequel. The book intrigued me when I first looked at it and it kept me reading the second I started it as most books I like do. This book wasn't my absolute favorite but I would recommend it to anyone. It's a very mysterious story even from the beginning and doesn't leave out anything so it's not confusing at the end like some books I've read are. Some parts of the book aren't well explained but later get covered so nothing gets left out. I could picture the people but only vaguely, the author doesn't describe them much and it gets easier to picture them from the pictures that Jacob keeps stumbling across.
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