Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Tales of the Peculiar
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 2/3/1979
WEBSITE: http://www.ransomriggs.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/books/ransom-riggs-is-inspired-by-vintage-snapshots.html http://articles.latimes.com/2014/jan/09/entertainment/la-ca-jc-ransom-riggs-tahereh-mafi-20140112
See existing entry that can be adapted
RESEARCHER NOTES: – –
LC control no.:
n 2007030498
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/n2007030498
HEADING:
Riggs, Ransom
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__ |a Riggs, Ransom. Scatter brained, c2006: |b t.p. (Ransom Riggs) p. 243 (film director; lives in Los Angeles; has worked as a journalist, photographer, editor of documentaries)
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__ |a Riggs, Ransom. Hollow city, 2014: |b title page (Ransom Riggs) flap page 4 of dust jacket (Ransom Riggs; grew up in Florida; lives in Los Angeles [includes photograph])
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PERSONAL
Born February 3, 1979, in MD; married Abbi Russal (divorced); married Tahereh Mafi (a writer).
EDUCATION:Kenyon College, B.A., 2001; University of Southern California, master’s degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, filmmaker, and blogger.
AVOCATIONS:Photography, playing guitar, cycling, travel.
AWARDS:Silver Award for short film, WorldFest Houston, 2007, for Portable Living Room; Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire foreign YA novel prize, 2015, for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
WRITINGS
Writer and director of short films Spaceboy and Portable Living Room, both 2006. Author of film script Black River. Contributor to anthologies, including Mental Floss: Scatterbrained, edited by Will Pearson, Mangesh Hattikudur, and John Green, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2006; and Mental Floss Presents In the Beginning: From Big Hair to the Big Bang, edited by Mary Carmichael, Pearson & Hattikudur, 2007. Contributor to Mental Floss magazine and to travel blog Strange Geographies.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was adapted for audiobook, read by Jesse Bernstein, Random House Audio, 2011, and was released as a film in 2016 by Twentieth Century-Fox, with Tim Burton in the director’s chair. Black River was optioned for film by Black Forest Film Group.
SIDELIGHTS
For most people, a set of someone else’s old photographs might be a short-lived curiosity, something to browse before dumping in the trash. For author and filmmaker Ransom Riggs, however, these kinds of “found” photographs inspired a tantalizing question: What if? What if the boy shown covered in bees had them living inside of him? What if the person with a face painted on the back of his head actually had a second mouth there? What if a young man heard wild stories about such photos and discovered they were actually true? Riggs answers these questions and more in his first book for young readers, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and he shares other found photos in his large-format book Talking Pictures: Images and Messages Rescued from the Past.
Riggs was born in rural Maryland but moved to Florida at age five. In addition to attending a school for the gifted and talented, he “grew up writing stories and making videos in the backyard with my friends,” as he recalled on the Ransom Riggs Home Page. With aspirations of becoming a scriptwriter and film director, Riggs spent three summers at the University of Virginia Young Writer’s Workshop. There, as he would later recall, “I met so many great, brilliant people, and it convinced me that it was possible to make a life for myself as a writer.”
Armed with an English degree from Kenyon College, Riggs moved to the West Coast and enrolled at the University of Southern California’s School of Film and Television. He made several short films, including Spaceboy, in which a reclusive teen hopes to make contact with aliens and escape Earth until his brother’s girlfriend makes him reconsider his affinity with the rest of the human race. The film’s success at festivals led to distribution on iTunes and more film opportunities, including Web shorts and book trailers. Riggs’ other passion, writing, led him to write and blog for Mental Floss, a magazine/Web site devoted to interesting but little-known facts. His first book-length work, The Sherlock Holmes Handbook: The Methods and Mysteries of the World’s Greatest Detective, was created to coincide with a 2009 feature motion picture featuring the famous sleuth created by British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Photography had intrigued Riggs since he received a camera as a boy, and he became interested in collecting old photographs, often finding little treasures at flea markets. He started to specialize in collecting photos with an eerie edge to them, especially those featuring children. One day he showed some to his editor, who suggested that he should write a novel making them part of a larger story. Envisioning a home full of these “peculiar” children, Riggs searched through his own collection of 1,500 to 2,000 photos and also worked with other collectors to come up with the perfect pictures to illustrate his story. Sometimes a particularly “peculiar” photo would inspire him, as he explained to Susan Rife on the Arts Sarasota Web site. “The more story I wrote, the more pictures I found, and the pictures influenced where I wanted to go with the story sometimes. It was a really interesting process, kind of like a puzzle, only I could make up all the pieces.”
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, “Ransom Riggs’s haunting fantasy bestseller,” said Heidi MacDonald in a Publishers Weekly review, “… relates a horrific family tragedy that sets 16-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales.” As the novel opens, teenaged Jacob Portman describes some of the unique and unsettling photographs his grandfather Abe collected and also retells the man’s stories of the young subjects he claimed were his peers in a Welsh home for “peculiar children.” Although Jacob once believed his grandfather’s stories, he now questions whether they were instead a way for the young Abe Portman to cope with the horrors he encountered as a child growing up during World War II. After his grandfather is killed–by a gruesome monster only Jacob can see–the teen becomes more convinced in the truth of these stories; his parents, of course, fear that their son is having a psychological breakdown. Jacob almost agrees with their assessment, but then he finds a letter from Miss Alma LeFay Peregrine, his grandfather’s old headmistress, as well as Abe Portman’s final message to “follow the bird” and uncover the mystery hidden in his past. Jacob convinces his father to take him to Wales, where he finds the truth behind Abe Portman’s photos and the not-so-crazy stories that accompanied them.
Riggs’ first novel intrigued critics. “`Miss Peregrine’ was not conceived or composed with a young-adult audience in mind,” commented Maria Russo in the New York Times, “but its central premise–about people who are `peculiar’ in various ways and must struggle not only to survive, but also to save the clueless rest of humanity from violent evildoers–is certainly adolescent-friendly.” Reviewing Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, several critics praised Riggs’ original use of found photographs to create a unique story. “The author’s ability to use the photos to play with the reader’s imagination, while still holding the tension of the plot, is extraordinary,” Claire Cameron stated in her review of the novel for the Toronto Globe & Mail. “In Riggs’ hands,” Cameron added, “the use of found art is an elegant tool that reinforces the message of the book.” “Riggs,” declared a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “spins a gothic tale of strangely gifted children and the monsters that pursue them from a set of eerie, old trick photographs.” “On its own,” stated an AV Club reviewer, “Miss Peregrine’s Home would be a serviceable horror-fantasy, one with the top-heavy structure and wish-fulfillment indicative of a first book, but with just enough charm to make it worth a look to fans of the genre.” In Library Journal Laurel Bliss described the novel as “an original work that defies categorization,” while Voice of Youth Advocates contributor Barbara Allen considered it “an edge-of-your-seat adventure.” Although Booklist reviewer Michael Cart faulted the pacing in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, he noted that the photos “expand the oddness of the proceedings” and make the book “even more intriguing.” Readers “will find the photos either totally cool or kind of creepy, but either way they feed the book’s atmospherics,” Marjorie Kehe asserted in her review of the novel for the Christian Science Monitor. The critic added that Riggs’ children’s-book debut is “one of the more fantastically entertaining young adult books of the summer.” “An enjoyable, eccentric read,” according to a Publishers Weekly critic, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children “is distinguished by well-developed characters, a believable Welsh setting, and some very creepy monsters.” “Ostensibly,” wrote a Guardian reviewer, “the novel is genius–a new author with fresh ideas and a plot different to any other.” “With its X-Men: First Class-meets-time-travel story line, David Lynchian imagery, and rich, eerie detail,” asserted Rachel Orvino in Entertainment Weekly, “it’s no wonder Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has been snapped up by Twentieth Century Fox.”
The film of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was directed by noted filmmaker Tim Burton who, critics noted, put his own cinematic stamp on Riggs’ story. “When Jake finally does find the stately, gothic home his grandfather had told him about,” wrote Christy Lemire on the Roger Ebert Web site, “he discovers it’s in ruins, the result of a bombing decades earlier during World War II. But once he steps inside and begins investigating, the inhabitants dare to pop their heads out and the place comes colorfully to life. Seems they’re stuck in a time loop, doomed to repeat the same day in September 1943…. The time-conscious Miss Peregrine explains that she winds the clock back twenty-four hours at the end of each night, just before the moment of destruction.” “With its time-skipping chronology and family-reconciling framing device,” stated Variety critic Peter Debruge “the entire tale could be another of Burton’s Big Fish stories (from the film of the same name); it offers opportunities for Frankenweenie-style stop-motion; there are ostracized freaks (and even a dino-shaped topiary) straight out of Edward Scissorhands; and its elaborate, meticulously decorated mansion manages to improve upon the wonky houses seen in `Beetlejuice’ and `Dark Shadows.’… Although the director repeats more than he innovates this time around, for younger audiences, the film makes a terrific introduction to his blue-hued, forever-Halloween aesthetic.” “The effects throughout are marvelous,” said Todd McCarthy writing in the Hollywood Reporter, “notably the portrayal of Emma’s weightlessness, Miss Peregrine’s phenomenal transformation into a falcon and the resurrection of a sunken ocean liner from the ocean floor.” “Miss Peregrine,” declared Rolling Stone reviewer Peter Travers, “is a Mary Poppins for society’s rejects. A girl with two jaws, a boy who can animate inanimate objects, some mysterious twins–it’s Willy Wonka meets the X-brats with a stop at Hogwarts.”
Hollow City
Riggs’s long-awaited sequel, Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, begins where its predecessor ends. Jacob, Emma, and the rest of the peculiars are busy fighting off hollowgasts and wights on a time-travelling journey through London. Miss Peregrine has been trapped in her bird form, and if the children don’t figure out how to transform her, she will remain a bird forever. The answer to her rescue lies in 1940s London, and the children set off for the past without a minute to spare. “When he wrote `Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,’” Russo explained “Mr. Riggs began with the photos and created a story that would make sense of them, but for `Hollow City,’ he had to revise his process. “The plot had its own momentum this time,” he said. “I’d know that something had to happen, and I’d have to find a photo to fit it.” Only in later drafts, he said, could he make changes to use photos he loved.” “There’s a whole host of challenges that come with second books,” Riggs told She Knows Web site correspondent Jessica Hickam. “The end of the first book was so open-ended that I could have gone anywhere in the second book. And I tried going everywhere before I picked the way that I thought was best.”
Praising this approach in Xpress Reviews, Laurel Bliss cited Hollow City’s “fresh and original world,” filled “with likable, quirky characters and a very readable style.” According to a Kirkus Reviews critic, the book is “less a straightforward horrorfest than a tasty adventure for any reader with an appetite for the peculiar.” Notably, Hollow City is filled with period photographs (like its predecessor), and a Booksmugglers Web site contributor noted that “the images are so deliciously creepy and fantastic, I can easily forgive minor clunkiness in attempts to integrate those images to the text.” The contributor added: “Ultimately, Hollow City is an entertaining, if lopsided, trip. And when you end a book with that kind of cliffhanger? Well, it’s easy for me to say that I’ll certainly be back for more.” “For the legions awaiting it,” stated Chelsey Philpot in the Boston Globe, “… this sophomore novel, which is even richer than Riggs’s imaginative debut, will not disappoint. The cinematic qualities of the writing are high-definition bold, the love story more dramatic, and the parallels between the war the peculiars are fighting against the wights and the one that England is waging against Germany add the weight of history to Jacob’s undertaking.” “This sequel,” commented a Bookmarks reviewer, “creatively blends fantasy and mid-20th-century history.” Katie W. Beim-Esche, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, was also impressed, and she declared that “Hollow City is a well of backstory sprinkled with enough near-miss danger to get your heart pounding. The cliffhanger sets up what will surely be an Act Three alley-oop. In the end … Jacob must choose between the soporific safety of the modern world and the exotic, thrilling nightmare of the peculiar world. Read the first, read the second, then gnaw on your fingernails until the last book drops.” Indeed, as School Library Journal reviewer Billy Parrott advised, “the only downside: waiting for the third installment to find out what happens to Jacob and his peculiar friends.” “Where Miss Peregrine’s was slow and contemplative, gorgeous and thought-provoking for most of the novel,” declared Christina Franke in Bookmarks, “Hollow City starts out with a bang and continues at a pretty fast clip all the way to the incredibly intense conclusion.” “Superbly weaving horror elements with the light fantastic, Hollow City,” promised a Children’s Bookwatch reviewer, “will prove captivating.”
The third volume in the story of the Peculiars and their struggle against evil is Library of Souls. At the end of Hollow City, “Jacob discovered at the very last minute, just before potentially being devoured by [a] Hollow,” explained Rebecca Skane in the Portsmouth Review, “that he has the peculiar ability to speak their tongue and control them. No one can see them except for a few special peculiars, and Jacob is the only one left. Hence–he is the protector of Peculiars.” Now, Jacob and Emma must launch a last-ditch effort to rescue their fellow Peculiars from the menace of the Hollows and the Wights. “The challenge Riggs faces in Library of Souls is to match the remarkably high standard set by the first two books in the series, either the mind-bending bafflements of the first book or the edge-of-your-seat action of the second,” declared Steve Nathans-Kelly in Paste. “Riggs succeeds, delivering a thrilling conclusion to Jacob’s trilogy.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2011, Michael Cart, review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, p. 17; February 1, 2014, Snow Wildsmith, review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
Bookmarks, November-December, 2013, review of Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, p. 48.
Boston Globe, January 21, 2014, Chelsey Philpot, review of Hollow City.
Children’s Bookwatch, January, 2012, review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children; April, 2014, review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, p. 34; May, 2014, review of Hollow City.
Christian Science Monitor, June 17, 2011, Marjorie Kehe, review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children; March 24, 2014, Katie W. Beim-Esche, review of Hollow City.
Entertainment Weekly, June 24, 2011, Rachel Orvino, review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), August 20, 2011, Claire Cameron, review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, p. R20.
Guardian, May 31, 2016, review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
Hollywood Reporter, September 25, 2016, Todd McCarthy, review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2014, review of Hollow City; March 31, 2014, review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
Library Journal, May 15, 2011, Laurel Bliss, review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, p. 77.
New York Times, December 30, 2013, Maria Russo, “Ransom Riggs Is Inspired by Vintage Snapshots.”
Portsmouth Review, May 31, 2016, Rebecca Skane, review of Library of Souls.
Publishers Weekly, April 25, 2011, review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, p. 139; June 24, 2013, Heidi MacDonald, “More Than Worlds,” p. 34.
Rolling Stone, September 29, 2016, “`Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’ Review: Tim Burton Returns.”
School Library Journal, June, 2011, Misti Tidman, review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, p. 132; February, 2014, Billy Parrott, review of Hollow City.
Voice of Youth Advocates, June, 2011, Barbara Allen, review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, p. 191.
Variety, September 22, 2016, Peter Debruge, “Film Review: Tim Burton’s `Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.’”
Writer’s Digest, July-August, 2014, Adrienne Crezo, “Ransom Riggs: Picture Perfect,” p. 42.
Xpress Reviews, December 13, 2013, Laurel Bliss, review of Hollow City.
ONLINE
Arts Sarasota Web site, http://artssarasota.com/ (December 16, 2011), Susan Rife, “Ransom Riggs Visits Alma Mater to Discuss Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.”
AV Club, http://www.avclub.com/ (June 29, 2011), review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
Booksmugglers, http://thebooksmugglers.com/ (May 7, 2015), review of Hollow City.
Paste, https://www.pastemagazine.com/ (September 22, 2015), Steve Nathans-Kelly, review of Library of Souls.
Ransom Riggs Home Page, http://www.ransomriggs.com (May 7, 2015), author profile.
Roger Ebert, http://www.rogerebert.com/ (September 30, 2016), Christy Lemire, review of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
She Knows, http://www.sheknows.com/ (January 24, 2014), Jessica Hickam, author interview.*
Hi there, I’m Ransom and I write books. I also love taking (and finding) photographs, making films, traveling to places that are tricky to find on maps, urban exploring, and scuba diving, which is kind of like urban exploring, except with fish and shipwrecks instead of abandoned houses. If you want to connect with me on social media, I tweet and Instagram a lot, and post somewhat less frequently to my YouTube and Tumblr pages. So welcome, have a look around, and please don’t break anything.
HI, I'M RANSOM, and I like to tell stories. Sometimes I tell them with words, sometimes with pictures, often with both. I grew up on a farm on the Eastern shore of Maryland and also in a little house by the beach in Englewood, Florida where I got very tan and swam every day until I became half fish. I started writing stories when I was young, on an old typewriter that jammed and longhand on legal pads. When I was a little older I got a camera for Christmas and became obsessed with photography, and when I was a little older still my friends and I came into possession of a half-broken video camera and began to make our own movies, starring ourselves, using our bedrooms and backyards for sets. I have loved writing stories and taking photographs and making movies ever since, and have endeavored to do all three.
PROFILES AND INTERVIEWS
"A Book That Started With Its Pictures"
- New York Times
"Ransom Riggs and Tahereh Mafi's Home for Bestselling Authors"
- LA Times
"The Future of Books is Experimental"
- Mental_Floss
AFTER HIGH SCHOOL I WENT TO KENYON COLLEGE, a very pretty and quite old by American standards college in rural Ohio, where I studied literature and got a degree in English. Then I fulfilled a long-held dream and went to film school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. I'd been making films since the backyard-masterpiece days of my childhood, but at USC I learned how to make them bigger and better and shiny-looking. I graduated with what I thought was a pretty slick thesis film under my arm and went out into the world to conquer the film festival circuit and then Hollywood -- or at least that was the plan, though it didn't quite work out that way. I spent a few years writing scripts and taking meetings and getting not very far, trying any way I could to get noticed. All the while I was writing: for five years I had a gig as a daily blogger for mentalfloss.com, and I also wrote for their magazine, contributed to a few books they published through Harpercollins, and wrote for a couple of other publications here and there, as well.
ALL OF WHICH TURNED INTO AN OPPORTUNITY to do some work for a small publisher who knew my editors at mentalfloss. That was Quirk Books, who asked me if I was interested in writing a book about Sherlock Holmes for them. I jumped at the opportunity. That was The Sherlock Holmes Handbook. Next came Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, born out of my love for vintage photography and bizarro stories, and I never looked back. I still love movies and I still make short films (here are some recent ones) and one day I will make a feature -- when the time and the material are right. These days, though, I'm loving being a novelist, a photo collector, and an occasional short filmmaker. I live in Los Angeles with my wife, the lovely and talented Tahereh Mafi -- who is also a writer, and if you haven't read her lovely and exciting Shatter Me books you're missing out -- and we type and travel and drink tea together and it's really quite wonderful.
4/18/17, 12)36 PM
Print Marked Items
Hollow City
Children's Bookwatch.
(May 2014): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2014 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com/cbw/index.htm
Full Text:
Hollow City
Ransom Riggs, author
Kirby Heyborne, narrator
Blackstone Audiobooks
PO Box 969
Ashland, OR 97520
9781620647400 $29.95 www.BlackstoneAudio.com
Hollow City is the unabridged audiobook adaptation of the sequel to the breakout YA-horror hit, "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children". Opening in 1940, immediately after the terrifying events of the first novel, Hollow City follows Jacob and his friends in their struggle to journey to London, the peculiar capital of the world. An unexpected menagerie of animals, spirits, allies, and antagonists await! Superbly weaving horror elements with the light fantastic, Hollow City will prove captivating to listeners of all ages! A bonus PDF disc is filled with the oddly creepy, vintage- style photographs that are a signature hallmark of the series. Fans of the "Series of Unfortunate Events" novels may recognize a kindred spirit Ransom Riggs' unsettling, unnerving, and unforgettable adventures. Highly recommended! 10 CDs plus bonus PDF disc, 11 1/2 hours.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hollow City." Children's Bookwatch, May 2014. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA370754257&it=r&asid=c0bad6bbfa0dc44231799fb5ce1486df. Accessed 18 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A370754257
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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Children's Bookwatch.
(Apr. 2014): p34. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2014 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com/cbw/index.htm
Full Text:
The Graphic Novel Shelf
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children Ransom Riggs
Yen Press
9780376246289, $20.00, www.yenpress.com
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children appears in a graphic novel format with artwork by Cassandra Jean to accompany the story of a boy who has grown up hearing his grandfather's stories of his fantastic life at Miss peregrine's home during World War II, even observing photos of the children. As he ages Jacob comes to believe that the photos were forgeries and the stories false, but after his grandfather's death he sets out to learn the truth behind his grandfather's tall tales - and what he discovers will change his world. This graphic novel format represents a completely illustrated adaptation of Ransom Riggs' best-selling novel and is a pick for a wide age range already excited by the graphic novel format.
The Activity Shelf
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children." Children's Bookwatch, Apr. 2014, p. 34. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA368380660&it=r&asid=5f95ba49000edfa37eb4bf13540468e6. Accessed 18 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A368380660
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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Snow Wildsmith
Booklist.
110.11 (Feb. 1, 2014): p50. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2014 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. By Ransom Riggs. Illus. by Cassandra Jean. 2013. 272p. Yen, $20 (9780316245289). 741.5. Gr. 8-11.
A graphic adaptation of Riggs's popular crossover novel might seem like a strange prospect since the original is already illustrated with the odd, antique photos that inspired Riggs' unusual tale. But Jean (Beautiful Creatures, 2013) doesn't try to overshadow the pictures with her artwork, instead seamlessly blending them in. At first readers will find those photos as fake as 16-year-old Jacob does, believing them to be nothing more than false memories that helped his grandfather survive WWII. But when monsters prove to be real and kill Jacob's grandfather, the boy must flee to an island off the coast of Wales to find the "peculiar" children who sheltered his grandfather, who will help Jacob learn who he is, and who he will, in the end, have to save from the monsters. Jean's scratchy black-and-white line drawings perfectly detail Jacob's mundane life until he discovers the island's secrets and color comes winging in. The luminous art brings the heart of Riggs' story to life--albeit at the expense of some character development--and should leave readers eager for the next installment. --Snow Wildsmith
Wildsmith, Snow
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wildsmith, Snow. "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2014, p. 50. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA358698919&it=r&asid=858d9285ac7220da28e28af3b6214384. Accessed 18 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A358698919
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Riggs, Ransom: HOLLOW CITY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 15, 2014): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2014 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Riggs, Ransom HOLLOW CITY Quirk Books (Children's Fiction) $17.99 1, 14 ISBN: 978-1-59474-612-3
Along with picking up the action where it left off in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2011), Riggs fills in background detail while adding both talking animals and more children with magical powers to the cast. With evil wights and murderous hollowgasts in hot pursuit-and only days to save their beloved Miss Peregrine from permanently becoming a bird-Jacob and his nine young (in body, if not age) companions fling themselves through time loops to Blitz-torn London. The growing attachment between Jacob and kindhearted fire-conjurer Emma turns out to play a crucial role in the plot. After a brisk round of chases, captures, escapes and bombings-capped by a devastating reversal-the two end up separated from most of their allies but with a new talent that just might save "peculiardom" from its seemingly all-powerful enemies. As before, the author spins his tale in part around a crop of enigmatic vintage trick or portrait photographs, including two men (corpses?) sharing a bed with skeletons, a pipe- smoking dog and a staring girl with a huge hole through her midsection. Though less of a novelty here than in the opener, these still add distinctly creepy notes (even when the subject is supposedly comical) to a tale already well- stocked with soul eaters and tentacled monsters. Less a straightforward horrorfest than a tasty adventure for any reader with an appetite for the-peculiar. (Fantasy. 11-14)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Riggs, Ransom: HOLLOW CITY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2014. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA355395813&it=r&asid=98c664c5d9a868b71994afd92a495f4c. Accessed 18 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A355395813
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Hollow City
Ransom Riggs
Bookmarks.
(November-December 2013): p48. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 Bookmarks Publishing LLC http://www.bookmarksmagazine.com/
Full Text:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Ransom Riggs, a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker, is the author of The Sherlock Holmes Handbook (2009) and the surprise young adult best seller Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Sept/ Oct 2011). Hollow City is the second novel in the Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series.
The Story: Hollow City opens in 1940, just where the first book left off, with 16-year-old Jacob Portman and his motley group of nine fellow "peculiar" children fleeing the creepy Welsh island of Cairnholm and making their way to London, the war-torn world capital. The gifted children[mdash]including Jacob's love interest, Emma Bloom, whose hands produce fire[mdash]are desperate to rescue their headmistress, Miss Peregrine herself, who is trapped in the form of a bird. Illustrated with Riggs's characteristic vintage photographs and full of unexpected encounters with monsters and humans alike, this sequel creatively blends fantasy and mid- 20th-century history.
Quirk Books. 400 pages. $17.99. ISBN: 9781594746123
Eamo the Geek (blog)
"With the introductions out of the way in book one, Riggs now has the time and scope to offer a much bigger story than ... previously, while also expanding on the characters and building on the mythology of the Peculiars. ... It's a brilliant expansion of an inventive novel and although a darker and more grown-up affair ... [the novel] will not only delight, excite and intrigue fans, but leave them with an uncomfortable ... case of the Heebiejeebies." EAMON AMBROSE
Boston Globe
"The cinematic qualities of the writing are high-definition bold, the love story more dramatic, and the parallels between the war the peculiars are fighting against the wights and the one that England is waging against Germany add the weight of history to Jacob's undertaking. ... As fantastic as Hollow City is, it does have a flaw: This title does not stand on its own very well." CHELSEY PHILPOT
YA Books Central
"Where Miss Peregrine's was slow and contemplative, gorgeous and thoughtprovoking, for most of the novel, Hollow City starts out with a bang and continues at a pretty fast clip all the way to the incredibly intense conclusion. ... The pictures help sell the magical realism feel of the novel, and make the incredible fantastic elements feel very real." CHRISTINA FRANKE
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Kirkus
"As before, the author spins his tale in part around a crop of enigmatic vintage trick or portrait photographs. ... Less a straightforward horrorfest than a tasty adventure for any reader with an appetite for the ... peculiar."
Seattle Post Intelligencer
"[T]hroughout the book I had the strange feeling that the author might actually be bending the story to complement the photographs and not the other way around, something I did not notice in the first installment. ... This engrossing and enjoyable book ends with another cliffhanger, which is sure to bring back ... readers for more." ZOHAR (MANOFLABOOK.COM)
CRITICAL SUMMARY
Riggs's first young adult novel drew comparison to works by Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke. Once again, he proves to be a master of the mixedgenre teen fantasy and perfectly balances supernatural horror with everyday coziness. The photographs, collected at flea markets and antique shops (and only occasionally digitally altered), are seamlessly incorporated into the story. This sequel is fasterpaced and more gripping than the original, with another great cliffhanger paving the way for a third book. Riggs also develops the characters more fully, giving each a different "peculiar" talent; his female characters are particularly strong in this respect. As the Boston Globe critic cautions, however, Hollow City cannot stand alone successfully[mdash]so read Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children first.
By Ransom Riggs Riggs, Ransom
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Riggs, Ransom. "Hollow City." Bookmarks, Nov.-Dec. 2013, p. 48. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA367711360&it=r&asid=ef94f1ede2d9bddd3e24fa1992196d79. Accessed 18 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A367711360
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More than words
Heidi MacDonald
Publishers Weekly.
260.25 (June 24, 2013): p34. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
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Biography, fantasy, SF, historical novel, superhero--this season's best graphic novels follow no set trend except an eclectic approach to storytelling, both factual and fictional, from a cartoony biography of a feminist icon to a poetic photo-realistic picture book about an angel trapped in the form of a park statue.
The best nonfiction books feature art that adds an emotional depth beyond prosaic if accurate illustration. March (Book One) leads the memoir parade with the story of Rep. John Lewis and his historic efforts in the civil rights struggle. Artist Nate Powell adds his own bold ink-washed art to convey the powerful story. Peter Bagge is admired for his long career as a surgically accurate satirist, and he bring the same high energy to Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story, a thoroughly researched biography of the birth control pioneer that stints on neither her egotism nor heroism, but paints a picture of a very real woman.
Rebels of a different kind are sketched in Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor, a history of the colorful early days of hip-hop, a kaleidoscope of unforgettable characters from Grandmaster Flash to Sylvia Robinson. Piskor uses the contemporaneous style of Marvel Comics and artificially aged paper stock to give the era of Adidas and backpacks a
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larger-than-life vibe. Finally, no season would be complete without the latest in Rick Geary's ongoing series of 20th- century murders: with elegant, unsettling penwork, Madison Square Tragedy: The Murder of Stanford White tells the notorious story of architect Stanford White, who was murdered by a jealous husband in a theater atop the original Madison Square Garden.
Several comics masters are back with new tales on the fiction side: Jeff Smith's Rasl is collected in full-color after being serialized in black-and-white. The story of a time-hopping art thief with a secret is full of gripping twists and turns. Finder's Carla Speed McNeil brings her finely honed sense of character to Bad House, written by YA author Sara Ryan (The Rules for Hearts), an atmospheric mystery set in a crumbling logging town where two teens try to unlock the past. And Warren Ellis, bestselling author of Plantary and Gun Machine, brings his merciless pacing to a rare original Marvel graphic novel, Avengers: Endless Wartime, which finds the popular superheroic band getting together one more time to fight a threat from the past in the new and frightening world of drones and robotic warfare.
Fans of Shaun Tan's The Arrival should enjoy Unforgotten by Tohby Riddle, a nearly wordless story about an angel that falls to earth illustrated in a stunning photo collage style. The words are familiar but the images create a moody modern world where the fantastic meets the mundane. The line between fantasy and reality is blurred even further in The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship That Sank Twice by Mike Carey and Peter Gross. Based on the ongoing comics series, Tommy Taylor, the son of the author of the worldwide sensation, boy wizard Tommy Taylor, learns that the book may be more about his life than he suspected. The series has been a smart, beautifully rendered fantasy, and this ties the whole epic together.
Finally, Julie Maroh's Blue Angel (Blue Is the Warmest Color) gained attention when a film version won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Maroh's graphic novel is a lyrical ode to first love as 15-year-old Clementine falls for blue-haired Emma. While the story, translated from French, breaks no new ground, Maroh's art says more about love and passion than words ever could.
PW's Top 10: Comics.
March (Book One).
Congressman John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell. Top Shelf, Aug.
Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story. Peter Bagge. Drawn and Quarterly, Oct. Hip Hop Family Tree.
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Ed Piskor Fantagraphics, Oct.
Madison Square Tragedy: The Murder of Stanford White. Rick Geary. NBM, Dec.
Rasl.
Jeff Smith. Cartoon Books, Oct.
Bad Houses.
Sara Ryan and Carla Speed McNeil. Dark Horse, Oct.
The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship That Sank Twice.
Mike Carey and Peter Gross. DC, Sept.
Unforgotten.
Tohby Riddle. InkLit, Nov.
Avengers: Endless Wartime.
Warren Ellis, Clark Gregg, and Mike McKone. Marvel, Oct.
Blue Angel (Blue Is the Warmest Color).
Julie Maroh. Arsenal Pulp, Oct.
COMICS
ANOMALY PUBLISHING (WWW.ANOMALYPRODUCTIONS.COM)
Shifter by Brian Haberlin, Skip Brittenham, and Brian Holguin, illus, by Kunrong Yap (Oct. 8, hardcover, $29.95, ISBN 978-0985334215). The team behind Anomaly, the epic 370-page graphic novel, is building on its immersive storytelling with this new release, which uses Augmented Reality.
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ARCHAIA
The Joyners in 3d by R.J. Ryan and David Marquez (Nov., hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-936393-70-1). Successful technology executive George Joyner stands on the brink of revolutionizing life in America (again) with his latest high- flying invention. But just as business booms, George's private life begins to implode; 3-D glasses included.
Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard, Vol. 2 by various (Nov., hardcover, $19.95, ISBN 978-1-936393-26-8). In the June Alley Inn mouse tavern, a storytelling contest begins, with the prize the winners having their outstanding debt to the barmaid forgiven. Each story is written and illustrated by a different creator, including Stan Sakai, C.P. Wilson III, and Bill Willingham.
ARCHIE COMICS
Archie Meets Glee by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Dan Parent (Aug. 6, trade paper, $12.99, ISBN 978-1936975457). When the Riverdale gang meets the teens of TV's Glee, musical mayhem is sure to ensue. The impending collision of two universes threatens the world as we know it, and it's up to the teens to use the power of song to restore everything back to normal.
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
Blue Angel (Blue Is the Warmest Color) by Julie Maroh (Oct. 15, paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-1551525143). Clementine discovers herself and the elusive magic of love when she meets a confident blue-haired girl named Emma: a lesbian love story bristles with the energy of youth and rebellion and the eternal light of desire. The basis for the Palme d'Or- winning film.
ATLANTIC BOOKS
Gulliver's Travels by Martin Rowson (Nov. 1, paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-1782390084). A modern illustrated retelling of Swift's classic, Rowson's caustic and provocative update is both a homage to the original and an entirely up-to-date indictment of the enduring human idiocies that enraged Swift 300 years ago.
BOOM! STUDIOS
Suicide Risk, Vol. 1 by Mike Carey, illus, by Elena Casagrande (Oct. 1, paper, $9.99, ISBN 978-1608863327). After barely surviving a superpowered bank heist gone horribly wrong, beat cop Leo Winters vows to try and find a way to stop the robbers. Following a lead, he discovers two lowlifes who seem to be able to grant a person powers ... for the right price.
Polarity by Max Bemis, illus, by Jorge Coelho (Dec. 3, paper, $14.99, ISBN 978-1608863464). Say Anything's frontman, Max Bemis, makes his comics debut. Timothy Woods is a bipolar artist stuck in the world of hipsters, meaningless sex, and vain art--aka Brooklyn. Things change when Timothy discovers that his bipolar medication has been suppressing his superpowers.
CARTOON BOOKS
Rasl by Jeff Smith (Oct. 15, hardcover, $39.95, ISBN 978-1888963373). When Rasl, a thief and ex-military engineer, discovers the lost journals of Nikola Tesla, he bridges the gap between modern physics and history's most notorious scientist in a tale of adventure and betrayal. The first complete full-color version of Smith's follow-up to his classic Bone.
COACH HOUSE BOOKS
The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James (Nov. 12, paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-1552452875). The triumphant return of the 1975 cult classic and seminal graphic novel--it's a nightmare you can't awake from. Cryptic and disturbing, The Cage spurns narrative for atmosphere, guiding us through a series of disarrayed rooms and desolate landscapes.
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DARK HORSE BOOKS
Smoke/Ashes by Alex de Campi, Igor Kordey, Carla Speed McNeil, et al. (Sept. 18, trade paper, $29.99, ISBN 978- 1616551698). Reporter Katie Shah and assassin Rupert Cain become targets of a sinister cabal bent on controlling the nation's oil and of a psychotic intelligence that has uploaded itself onto the Internet.
Sin Titulo by Cameron Stewart (Sept. 25, hardcover, $19.99, ISBN 978-1616552480). Following the death of his grandfather, young Alex Mackay discovers a mysterious photograph in the old man's belongings that sets him on an adventure like no other--where dreams and reality merge and amily secrets are laid bare. Taken from the Eisner Award-winning Web comic.
Bad House by Sara Ryan and Carla Speed McNeil (Oct. 30, trade paper, $19.99, ISBN 978-1-59582-993-1). Lives intersect in the most unexpected ways when teenagers Anne and Lewis cross paths at an estate sale. Failin, Ore,. once a thriving logging community, now has crumbling businesses and bitter and disaffected citizens. Anne and Lewis refuse to succumb to the older generation's fate as they discover the secrets of their hometown and their own families.
Bandette by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover (Nov. 6, hardcover, $14.99, ISBN 978-1-61655-279-4). The world's greatest thief is a costumed teen burglar in swinging Paris by the nom d'arte of Bandette. Gleefully plying her skills on either side of the law, Bandette is a thorn in the sides of both police inspector Belgique and the criminal underworld. Based on the Eisner-nominated Web comic.
DC COMICS
Fairest in All the Land by Bill Willingham (Nov. 26, hardcover, $22.99, ISBN 978-1401239008). The first original graphic novel based on New York Times best-selling writer Bill Willingham's Fairest, which explores the secret histories of the most stunning beauties in Fabletown: Cinderella, Snow White, Briar Rose, and more.
Injustice: Gods Among Us, Vol. 1 by Tom Taylor and Jheremy Raapack (Oct. 29., trade paper, $16.99, ISBN 978- 1401245009). The critically acclaimed prequel comic to the hit fighting game. Things in the DC Universe change after Superman is tricked into destroying the one thing he loves the most.
The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship That Sank Twice by Mike Carey, illus, by Peter Gross (Sept. 24, hardcover, $22.99, ISBN 978-1401229764). Tom Taylor has lived his life being mistaken for Tommy Taylor, the boy wizard from the world-famous series of novels penned by Tom's long-lost father. After a series of strange events start to parallel the lives of both Taylors, Tom realizes that he might be the character on the page made flesh.
DRAWN & QUARTERLY
Rage of Poseidon by Anders Nilsen (Oct. 29, hardcover, $19.95, ISBN 978-1770461284). A wise and funny collection of modern-day parables about the ties between humans and their gods by the author of Big Questions. In one, the god Poseidon sets out into the modern world with mixed results.
Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story by Peter Bagge (Oct. 15, hardcover, $21.95, ISBN 978-1770461260). The alternative-comics master offers an indelible and idiosyncratic take on the protofeminist women's health pioneer. Drawn in full color, Bagge's signature rubbery style and potent sense of humor make for the most accessible Sanger biography ever.
ECW PRESS
Sinemania!: A Satirical Expose of the Most Outlandish Movie Directors: Welles, Hitchcock, Tarantino, and More by Sophie Cossette (Sept. 1, paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1770411128). Twenty-three North American and European directors--including Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Roman Polanski--are the subjects of this wickedly humorous tribute to cinema in graphic nonfiction.
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FANTAGRAPHICS
Black Is the Color by Julia Gfrorer (Sept., trade paper, $9.99, ISBN 978-1-60699-717-8). A 17th-century sailor, abandoned at sea by his shipmates, endures but eventually succumbs, both to his lingering death sentence and the advances of a cruel and amorous mermaid. The debut collection by an important new cartooning voice.
Celebrated Summer by Charles Forsman (Nov., trade paper, $16.99, ISBN 978-1-60699-685-0). A funny and moving story of escalating humor and tension between two disaffected teens, Mike and Wolf, who take a spontaneous summer road trip after dropping acid.
Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor (Oct., trade paper, $24.99, ISBN 978-1-60699-690-4). The lore of the early days of hip-hop has become the stuff of myth, and Ed Piskor, acclaimed for his hacker graphic novel Wizzywig, has created an explosively entertaining, encyclopedic history of the formative years of the music genre that changed global culture, from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five to Rick Rubin.
FIRST SECOND BOOKS
Tune: Still Life by Derek Kirk Kim and Les McClaine (Nov. 12, paper, $16.99, ISBN 978-1596437609). Andy Go thought he was signing on for an easy job as an exhibit in an alien zoo--but it turns out his contract is for life. How can he escape? And will things be any better if he brings his maybe-girlfriend along?
The Cute Girl Network by MK Reed and Greg Means, illus, by Joe Flood (Nov. 12, paper, $17.99, ISBN 978- 1596437517). It's love at first sight for Jack and Jane, until Jane's busybody friends decide she deserves better. Poor Jane is about to learn every detail of Jack's past misadventures ... whether she wants to or not. Will love prevail?
HILL AND WANG
The Great American Documents: Vol. 1: Prologues of Promise, 1620-1830 by Russell Motter, Ruth Ash, and Ernie Colon (Jan. 7, hardcover, $40, ISBN 978-0809094608). The essential primer on 20 of the most influential American documents between 1620 and 1830.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
The Best American Comics 2013, edited by Jeff Smith, Jessica Abel, and Matt Madden (Oct. 8, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-0547995465). A collection of the best graphic pieces published in American periodicals during 2012, compiled by Jeff Smith, author and illustrator of the comic Bone. 20,000-copy announced first printing.
IDW PUBLISHING
Visual Funk: Jim Mahfood Art by Jim Mahfood (Aug. 28, hardcover, $49.99, ISBN 978-1-61377-723-7). The 16-year professional career of Jim Mahfood, aka Food One, has spanned the fields of comic books, illustration, animation, advertising art, murals, gallery shows, body painting, and live art in bars and nightclubs. This is his first art book.
Amelia Cole and the Unknown World by Adam P. Knave, D.J. Kirkbride and Nick Brokenshire (Aug. 28, trade, $19.99 ISBN 978-1-61377-700-8). Amelia Cole lives in two worlds--literally. One runs on magic; the other is built on technology. When the barriers between the worlds start to break down, she must take extreme action.
IMAGE
East of West, Vol. 1: The Promise by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta (Aug. 28, trade paper, $9.99, ISBN 978-1- 60706-770-2). This is the world, not the one we wanted but the one we deserved. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse roam the Earth, signaling the End Times for humanity, and our best hope for life lies in death.
Century West by Howard Chaykin (Sept. 11, trade paper, $7.99, ISBN 978-1-60706-788-7). Century, Tex., used to be a sleepy little burg, barely a whistle stop between nowhere and the great beyond, until the 20th century arrived with a
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bang. Chaykin tells the colorful story of the American West, transformed from frontier to legend. KOYAMA PRESS
(DIST. BY CONSORTIUM)
Fata Morgana by Jon Vermilyea (Nov. 12, trade paper, $15, ISBN 978-1927668030) follows the adventure of a young boy through the landscapes of his imagination. He encounters and befriends creatures that are, like all mirages, born out of aspects of his own unconscious. Presented in vibrantly colored two-page panoramas, it is a feast for the eyes and mind.
Little Tommy Lost: Book One by Cole Closser (Sept. 10, paper, $15, ISBN 978-1927668016). Separated from his parents on a trip to the big city, a lost little boy unknowingly sets out on a great adventure as he searches for a way home. Closser's work is steeped in cartooning history, but filled with a sense of the new.
MARVEL
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol #1: Cosmic Avengers by Brian Michael Bendis and various (Sept. 10., hardcover, $24.99 978-0785168287). Why has Earth suddenly become the most important planet in the galaxy? That's what the Guardians of the Galaxy are going to find out. But while London deals with a brutal invasion by the Badoon, the fate of the Guardians may have already been decided millions of miles away.
Avengers: Endless Wartime by Warren Ellis, Clark Gregg, and Mike McKone (Oct. 1, hardcover, $24.99 ISBN 978- 0785184676). The first in a series of original graphic novels from Marvel. An abomination, long thought buried, has resurfaced in a war-torn land--but now it wears an American flag. Captain America will not stand for yet more death at the hands of a ghost.
NBM PUBLISHING
Madison Square Tragedy: The Murder of Stanford White by Rick Geary (Dec. 1, hardcover, $15.99, ISBN 978- 1561637621). Rick Geary's latest Treasury of Murder presents the spicy story of a prominent New York architect and his equally famous protege, showgirl-cum-model Evelyn Nesbit, all coming to a rather bad end. Expect his usual tongue-in-cheek tone.
The Complete "Omaha" the Cat Dancer: Vol. 8 by Kate Worley, James Vance, and Reed Waller (Sept. 1, paper, $15.99, ISBN 978-1561637546). After many years, this signal and celebrated post-underground achievement in comics comes to its conclusion thanks to James Yance's and Reed Waller's development of Kate Worley's notes. Quality erotic comics.
Betty Blues by Renaud Dillies (Nov. 1, hardcover, $18.99, ISBN 978-1561637584). Dillies, of Eisner-nominated Bubbles & Gondola and Abelard fame, is back with a tale of deep love taken for granted. Little Rice Duck has built himself quite the reputation around the West Wood, playing his trumpet in bars with their smoky, sweaty ambience. But between his trumpet and his flame Betty, things are going astray.
NOBROW
(In a Sense) Lost and Found by Roman Muradov (Jan., hardcover, $18.95, ISBN 978-1907704673). F. Premise awoke one morning from troubled dreams to find that her innocence had gone missing. This first graphic novel by rising star Muradov explores the theme of innocence by treating it as a tangible object; something that can be used, lost, and mistreated.
ONI
Diesel Sweeties Vol. 1: I'm a Rocker, I Rock Out by R. Stevens. (Aug. 14, trade, $19.99, ISBN 978-1-62010-090-5). Diesel Sweeties, the long-running and pioneering Web comic that was into pixel art before pixel art was cool and
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made fun of hipsters before you knew what that word meant, is now available in the best form possible: artisanal paper-based pixels.
The Sixth Gun Hardcover, Vol. 1 by Cullen Bunn, Brian Hurtt, with Bill Crabtree (Oct. 2, hardcover, $49.99, ISBN 978-1-934964-84-2). During the darkest days of the Civil War, wicked cutthroats came into possession of six pistols of otherworldly power. In time, the Sixth Gun, the most dangerous of the weapons, vanished. When the gun surfaces in the hands of an innocent girl, dark forces reawaken. A deluxe collection of the popular series.
PALLAS ATHENE
How to Be Rich: What to Do with It When You've Got It! by John Ruskin, Kevin Jackson, and Hunt Emerson (Oct. 1, paper, $9.95, ISBN 978-0955093845). Darren Bloke always dreamed of being rich; one day his dream came true. What he hadn't imagined was that for every problem he solved, another one would spring up. The first in a trilogy of comics based on the social ideas of John Ruskin, this book reveals the real nature of wealth and poverty.
PENGUIN/INKLIT
Unforgotten by Tohby Riddle (Nov. 5, hardcover, $19.95, ISBN 978-0425270912). In a timely and timeless tale of breathtaking beauty and humble humanity, this striking, wordless graphic novel featuring the story of angels on Earth and human compassion is by the Award-winning Australian illustrator.
Starling by Sage Stossel (Dec. 3, paper, $17.95, ISBN 978-0425266311) is an original graphic novel from the Atlantic magazine cartoonist of Sage, Ink. When Xanax and therapy fail to relieve her stress, Amy does what any young woman in the big city would do: she uses her super-strength, speed, flight, and ability to generate 750 volts from her hands to fight crime as the mysterious masked vigilante, Starling.
REBELLION
Zombo: You Smell of Crime and I Am the Deodorant by Al Ewing and Henry Flint (Oct. 15, trade $17.99, ISBN 978- 1781080337). Al Ewing and Henry Flint's insane, irreverent, and downright daft series about a Zombo created to fight sentient death planets, who somehow ends up on a celebrity talent show, fighting his replacement and discovering that his backup personality is that of a cowardly male stripper.
SECRET ACRES
Iron Bound by Brendan Leach (n.d, paper, $21.95, ISBN 978-0-9888149-2-9). A gritty, authentic account of street gangs and life in the margins of the Ironbound district in Newark, N.J., in the early 1960s. With elements of noir mystery and crime drama, the story is aided by Leach's ability to evoke place and present a complex narrative about the tenuous relationships of characters mired in conflict and fear.
SELFMADEHERO
Pachyderme by Frederik Peeters (Oct. 1, hardcover, $19.95, ISBN 978-1906838607) is a surreal and poetic tale of mystery and imagination. Carice abandons her car and walks trancelike through a wood to visit her husband in the hospital. When her whistling wakes up an apparently dead body in the morgue, she soon realizes that the aged cadaver she's talking to is her future self.
We Won't See Auschwitz by Jeremie Dres (Sept. 3, paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-1906838638) is an uplifting semiautobiographical work about the search for identity. After their grandmother's death, Jeremie and his brother attempt to learn more about their family's Jewish-Polish roots. But Jeremie is less interested in how the Holocaust affected his family than what it means to be Jewish and Polish in today's world.
SEVEN STORIES PRESS
Fight the Power!: A Visual History of Protest Among the English-Speaking Peoples by Sean Michael Wilson,
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Benjamin Dickson, and various. (Sept. 24, paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-1609804923). According to Gandhi, there are four stages of protest: first they ignore you; then they ridicule you; then they fight you; then you win. Fight the Power! shows how this process has played out again and again throughout history.
TOP SHELF
March (Book One) by Congressman John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, illus, by Nate Powell (Aug., trade paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-60309-300-2) is a vivid firsthand account of John Lewis's lifelong struggle for civil and human rights (including his key roles in the historic 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 Selma-Montgomery March), meditating now on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation.
Renee by Ludovic Debeurme (Nov., trade paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-60309-304-0). French graphic novelist Debeurme returns with a devastating sequel to his prize-winning Lucille. While Lucille moves back in with her overbearing mother and Arthur serves time in prison for murder, a new character, Renee, becomes obsessed with a married jazz musician twice her age.
UNCIVILIZED BOOKS
Pascin by Joann Sfar, trans, by Edward Gauvin (Oct. 15, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-0984681471). This biography of the noted Jewish modernist painter is Sfar's most personal and important work. Creating in a direct and immediate drawing style, Sfar focuses more on the artist's personal and sexual life than on his art, and brings Pascin to life as the ultimate bohemian.
War of Streets and Houses by Sophie Yanow (Nov. 12, paper, $10.95, ISBN 978-0984681488). In 2012, Sophie Yanow participated in the massive Montreal student strikes. In the midst of protesting crowds and police containment, the military origins of urban planning suddenly became an undeniable reality.
VIZ MEDIA
Magi, Vol. 1 by Shinobu Otaka (Aug. 13, paper, $9.99, ISBN 978-1421559513) is a fantasy adventure inspired by One Thousand and One Nights. Deep within the desert lie the mysterious Dungeons, vast stores of riches there for the taking by anyone lucky enough to find them and brave enough to venture into the depths from where few have ever returned.
Midnight Secretary, Vol. 1 by Tomu Ohmi (Sept. 3, paper, $9.99, ISBN 978-1421559445). Mad Men meets The Vampire Diaries. Kaya Satozuka prides herself on being a consummate professional, so she doesn't even bat an eye when she's reassigned to the office of her company's difficult director. He's as prickly--and hot--as rumors suggest, and Kaya is unfazed--until she discovers that he's a vampire.
YEN PRESS
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children: The Graphic Novel by Ransom Riggs and Cassandra Jean (Oct. 29, hardcover, $20, ISBN 978-0316245289). Ransom Riggs's haunting fantasy bestseller, adapted to a graphic novel, relates a horrific family tragedy that sets 16-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales. 50,000-copy announced first printing.
No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular! Vol. 1 by Nico Tanigawa (Oct. 29, trade paper, $11.99, ISBN 978-0316243162). A surprise hit in Japan, this manga features a high school first-year student who realizes that her dreams of popularity may be out of reach--and it can't be her own fault, can it? 30,000-copy announced first printing.
MacDonald, Heidi
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
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MacDonald, Heidi. "More than words." Publishers Weekly, 24 June 2013, p. 34+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA335070393&it=r&asid=b57bebe4242c7a6932397f460d74a4e9. Accessed 18 Apr. 2017.
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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Children's Bookwatch.
(Jan. 2012): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2012 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com/cbw/index.htm
Full Text:
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children Ransom Riggs
Quirk Books
215 Church Street Philadelphia PA 19106 9781594744761 $17.99 www.quirkbooks.com
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is a recommendation for more mature teens who enjoy gothic-style novels of fantasy and mystery combined. It tells of a teen who journeys to a remote island off Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. His investigation shows the children were more than strange: they were dangerous, and may have been quarantined on the island--and may even still live. Fast action and psychological depth keep this fantasy a real winner, packed with unexpected twists and turns.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children." Children's Bookwatch, Jan. 2012. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA277520118&it=r&asid=31550fb2ff7ad398202bcec9c559ae6b. Accessed 18 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A277520118
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A Book That Started With Its Pictures
Ransom Riggs Is Inspired by Vintage Snapshots
By MARIA RUSSODEC. 30, 2013
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Photographs from "Hollow City," Ransom Riggs's second novel.
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Growing up in Florida, the writer Ransom Riggs was often taken by his grandmother to swap meets and secondhand shops. “It was pretty torturous for an 11- or 12-year-old boy,” Mr. Riggs said recently, “but I would find these boxes of old snapshots.”
One picture — it reminded him of a girl he’d had a crush on at camp — had such an effect on him that he bought it and put it by his bed. “Years later, I took it out and looked on the back,” he recalled, “and it said that she had died at age 15 of leukemia. I thought, oh, wow, I’ve been living with a ghost.”
Mr. Riggs’s attraction to haunting photographs eventually became the catalyst for his first novel, “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” (2011), a surprise best seller, whose plot was inspired by the dozens of vintage snapshots featured in its pages, which add to its uncanny atmosphere. With the film rights to “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” sold to 20th Century Fox (Chernin Entertainment is aiming for a summer 2015 release), and “Hollow City,” the second book in a planned “Miss Peregrine” trilogy, to be published in January, Mr. Riggs is beginning to feel at home in a career he calls “accidental.”
It was in 2009 that Mr. Riggs, a graduate of the University of Southern California’s film school, stumbled on a trove of vintage snapshots at a flea market and felt the stirrings of an obsession.
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“I realized I can find these amazing little lost pieces of art and be my own curator and rescue them from the garbage,” he said, “and they’re a quarter each.” Long a connoisseur of abandoned houses and mysteriously desolate landscapes, Mr. Riggs said he was drawn to odd or disturbing photos that suggested lost back stories.
On a sunny morning at his carefully renovated Spanish-style home here, Mr. Riggs, 34, who is tall and lanky with a manner both gentlemanly and unpretentious, flipped through his neatly organized boxes of snapshots, explaining why he chose some of his favorites. “The look on her face,” he said, pointing to a photograph of a woman sitting stiffly on the lap of a Nazi soldier. “That’s what it’s all about.”
While his snapshot collection grew, Mr. Riggs was training his sights on a filmmaking career, working on spec screenplays and supporting himself with freelance writing. Jason Rekulak, the publisher of Quirk Books in Philadelphia, for whom Mr. Riggs had been doing work for hire, asked him if he had any books he wanted to write. Mr. Riggs said he thought of the snapshots, particularly those with an “Edward Gorey-like Victorian weirdness, these haunting images of peculiar children.”
Mr. Riggs’s idea was to do a Halloween book of photos accompanied by rhyming couplets. It was Mr. Rekulak who suggested that the eerie pictures of the children might lend themselves to a novel.
Told from the point of view of Jacob Portman, a lonely 16-year-old Floridian who suspects that his grandfather’s tales of growing up on an island off Wales in a home full of children with unusual abilities may not have been invented, “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” incorporates time travel and a richly imagined alternate reality. Some of the black-and-white snapshots that pepper its pages are Mr. Riggs’s own; some are borrowed from collectors like Robert E. Jackson, whose pictures were exhibited in “The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978,” a 2007 show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
“Miss Peregrine” was not conceived or composed with a young-adult audience in mind, but its central premise — about people who are “peculiar” in various ways and must struggle not only to survive, but also to save the clueless rest of humanity from violent evildoers — is certainly adolescent-friendly.
Photo
Ransom Riggs at home in Santa Monica, Calif. Old photographs of strangers inspire his novels. Credit Stephanie Diani for The New York Times
Mr. Rekulak said Quirk’s sales department told him, “You could sell it as an adult book, but you could also sell it in Y.A,” referring to young adult. Because the hero was 16, and his “voice had an earnest quality,” Mr. Rekulak said, “we opted to put it in Y.A.”
The book, though, was hard to market to bookstores as a young-adult title, Mr. Rekulak said, because of the vintage photographs and the black-and-white cover. Quirk took to the Internet, including posting a video trailer made by Mr. Riggs. “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” made its debut at No. 7 on the New York Times best-seller list, and has sold 1.5 million copies in all formats.
“The creepy factor of the photos was obviously appealing to many adults and teens,” said Leslie Hawkins, owner of Spellbound Children’s Bookshop in Asheville, N.C., where, she said, members of a book group for adults who read young-adult material had enjoyed “Miss Peregrine.”
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“Hollow City,” which has a planned 250,000-copy first printing, follows Jacob and his peculiar companions as they make their way through World War II-era London, having left their protector Miss Peregrine’s house under terrifying circumstances.
“They have to find themselves as individuals,” Mr. Riggs said, “and negotiate their power structure and ask who’s the leader, now that Miss Peregrine is not there, and deal with all these external stressors that they haven’t had to face.”
In the months after “Miss Peregrine” was released, Mr. Riggs, who said he had never even read the Harry Potter series, met and was befriended by several established young-adult authors, including Kami Garcia and Melissa de la Cruz.
“I didn’t really know anything about their world, but they were all so incredibly welcoming and generous to me,” he said. Going through a divorce at the time, he struck up a friendship with Tahereh Mafi, author of the best-selling young-adult paranormal romance series Shatter Me, who had also recently ended a marriage. In September, Mr. Riggs married Ms. Mafi, 26.
The two have become something of a golden couple on the young-adult literary scene, with fans lining up to meet them at events and rushing to post their words on Twitter when either shares details of their life together on Twitter. They work side by side at a long desk, with an espresso machine on a nearby countertop and shelves filled with copies of their books in several languages.
When he wrote “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” Mr. Riggs began with the photos and created a story that would make sense of them, but for “Hollow City,” he had to revise his process. “The plot had its own momentum this time,” he said. “I’d know that something had to happen, and I’d have to find a photo to fit it.” Only in later drafts, he said, could he make changes to use photos he loved.
One such change in a chapter involving a near-kidnapping incorporated three quietly devastating pictures: one of an empty country road with three dead horses off to the side, one of soldiers’ bodies piled on a grassy path, and one of distraught men sitting on a wood floor, apparently being held prisoner while light streams into a window above.
“I love them because they’re beautiful photographs of horrible things,” Mr. Riggs said.
Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs - review
‘Very quickly the story line became insatiably dull’
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Guardian children's books site teen reviewer
Tuesday 31 May 2016 10.00 EDT Last modified on Monday 6 February 2017 09.20 EST
Having been recommended this book by a friend at school, I finally got round to reading it when I began college and joined the book club. This was the first book that we read and discussed together - so it’s safe to say I had high hopes!
Ostensibly, the novel is genius - a new author with fresh ideas and a plot different to any other. Something that really drew me in was the antique vintage photographs of peculiar people which Riggs had used to further his plot and establish a realism within the fantastical world of Peculiar Children.
I have to say - the beginning of the novel proved to be very engaging and thought-provoking; Jacob’s perspectives are intelligent and relatable, with the grief from his family history weighing heavy on his shoulders.
peculiar children
However, I found that from the moment we are introduced to the plethora of ‘peculiar’ children and their vigilant Head Mistress, the novel began to go downhill. Very quickly the story line became insatiably dull, with little engaging points and fewer intelligent ideas. Eventually even Jacob’s character becomes questionable - how far can we really go to defend and understand his behaviour?
All in all I feel that this novel was mediocre at best - hopefully you have better luck with it, or find hidden gems that make the narrative steadily bearable.
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MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN
From the "Peculiar Children" series, volume 1
by Ransom Riggs
Age Range: 12 - 14
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KIRKUS REVIEW
Riggs spins a gothic tale of strangely gifted children and the monsters that pursue them from a set of eerie, old trick photographs.
The brutal murder of his grandfather and a glimpse of a man with a mouth full of tentacles prompts months of nightmares and psychotherapy for 15-year-old Jacob, followed by a visit to a remote Welsh island where, his grandfather had always claimed, there lived children who could fly, lift boulders and display like weird abilities. The stories turn out to be true—but Jacob discovers that he has unwittingly exposed the sheltered “peculiar spirits” (of which he turns out to be one) and their werefalcon protector to a murderous hollowgast and its shape-changing servant wight. The interspersed photographs—gathered at flea markets and from collectors—nearly all seem to have been created in the late 19th or early 20th centuries and generally feature stone-faced figures, mostly children, in inscrutable costumes and situations. They are seen floating in the air, posing with a disreputable-looking Santa, covered in bees, dressed in rags and kneeling on a bomb, among other surreal images. Though Jacob’s overdeveloped back story gives the tale a slow start, the pictures add an eldritch element from the early going, and along with creepy bad guys, the author tucks in suspenseful chases and splashes of gore as he goes. He also whirls a major storm, flying bullets and a time loop into a wild climax that leaves Jacob poised for the sequel.
A trilogy opener both rich and strange, if heavy at the front end. (Horror/fantasy. 12-14)
Pub Date: June 7th, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59474-476-1
Page count: 234pp
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: March 31st, 2014
Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children
Author: Ransom Riggs
Publisher: Quirk
Community Grade (8 Users)
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It isn’t that difficult to understand the appeal of old photos. They turn the past into graspable moments, and even the most mundane shots have mystery: They’re full of people long dead, and places long changed. But no matter how often that appeal is described, it never really fades. The found vintage pictures Ransom Riggs uses to illustrate his debut novel, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, are melancholic, amusing, and eerie by turns. A few of them are even beautiful. But Riggs’ prose, while serviceable, never fully lives up to those images. There are some clever ideas here, and a decent mythology, and some fun monsters. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that everything is in service of yet another iteration of the “coming-of-age Chosen One” narrative, and not a particularly well-constructed one at that.
This would be true with or without the photos, but they make it worse; while they nominally serve in the same way hand-drawn illustrations might, Riggs’ decision to reference them directly as actual objects within the world of the novel gives them greater importance, forcing readers to acknowledge the gap between the images and the pedestrian story surrounding them. On its own, Miss Peregrine’s Home would be a serviceable horror-fantasy, one with the top-heavy structure and wish-fulfillment indicative of a first book, but with just enough charm to make it worth a look to fans of the genre. But those photos, which initially set the novel apart from the seemingly hundreds of young-adult books published along these lines every year, eventually start to weigh it down.
In Miss Peregrine’s, a teenager decides to investigate the stories his grandfather told him about an island off the coast of Wales. He finds more than he bargained for, of course, and there are adventures, involving a group of kids with remarkable abilities which are almost, but not quite, entirely similar to mutants from X-Men comics. For a story constructed to make use of a collection of vintage snapshots, it’s impressively cohesive, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with yet another recounting of the hero’s journey from callow youth to manhood. But the book never lives up to its own aesthetic, and the story refuses to get past surface level on the occasional odd idea or intriguing concept. Whatever its faults, Miss Peregrine’s only true sin is that, presentation aside, it isn’t really that peculiar.
'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children' Review: Tim Burton Returns
Iconoclastic director gets his mojo back – sort of – with eccentric, energetic adaptation of Ransom Riggs' young-adult novel.
Director Tim Burton gets his mojo back (sort of) with his adaptation of Ransom Riggs' young-adult novel 'Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.' 20th Century Fox
By Peter Travers
September 29, 2016
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Watch Magical Trailer for Tim Burton's 'Miss Peregrine'
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Tim Burton is a wizard of odd. The best of his films take us into a world where anything is possible ... but the impossible is even better. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, based on Ransom Rigg's 2011 young-adult novel, is so crowded with incident that it sometimes seems in danger of imploding. But Burton has always had an affinity for the peculiar. so how could he resist Miss Peregrine? As played by the bracingly eccentric Eva Green (the Penny Dreadful star who worked with Burton in 2012's Dark Shadows), Miss Peregrine is a Mary Poppins for society's rejects. A girl with two jaws, a boy who can animate inanimate objects, some mysterious twins – it's Willy Wonka meets the X-brats with a stop at Hogwarts.
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Miss P herself can, at a moment's notice, transform into a bird – a peregrine falcon, to be exact. Nazi bombs destroyed her Victorian orphanage on the Welsh island of Cairnholm during World War II. But do you think bombs can really touch her or her young charges? Nah. She's devised time bubbles, loops lasting 24-hours in which her peculiar wards can stay safe, except they have to repeat the same day over and over like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, but not as hilarious. The loop has worked for over 70 years. But now a new villain named Barron (Samuel L. Jackson) is determined to penetrate this bizzarro Brigadoon, the better to chow down on the eyeballs of gifted kids.
I won't give away Burton's visual surprises. But I will say that the present breaks into the past in the person of Jacob (Asa Butterfield), a teen visitor from 21st-century Florida who wants to know about this enchanted place where his recently murdered grandfather Abe (Terence Stamp) grew up in 1943. Seems reasonable. He thinks they'll love his smartphone. It also gives Jacob the chance to hit on the gorgeous Emma (Ella Purnell), the same beauty his grandfather had a thing for.
Still with me? Don't sweat it. Just go with the spell Burton casts with the help of screenwriter Jane Goldman (Stardust). Yes, the film feels overstuffed and way too familiar, with Burton repeating tricks from his greatest hits (think Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands). And the fun runs out much before the film ends. But stick with it just for those times when Burton flies high on his own peculiar genius.
‘Hollow City’
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By Chelsey Philpot GLOBE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY 21, 2014
RANSOM RIGGS
TAHEREH MAFI
RANSOM RIGGS
‘We aren’t so different. Outcasts and wanderers all — souls clinging to the margins of the world.” Sentences such as these, otherworldly photographs, and a lovely design are what make “Hollow City,” Ransom Riggs’s sequel to his best-selling young adult novel, “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” a stunning achievement.
“Hollow City” begins exactly where the first book left off: with 16-year-old Jacob Portman and his nine friends rowing away from a bomb-riddled island off the coast of Wales. Jacob came to the island in contemporary time to find answers about his grandfather. He leaves it in 1940 to save Miss Peregrine, the woman who helped him discover that he is a peculiar — just as she helped every other fleeing child in the three boats.
Peculiars are children with supernatural abilities. Little Olive will float to the heavens if she does not wear her weighted shoes. Scholarly Millard is invisible. Jacob’s feisty girlfriend, Emma, can make fire with her hands. As for Jacob, he has the ability to sense and see hollowgasts, creatures that devour peculiars so they can become powerful wights.
In order to get Miss Peregrine, who is trapped in bird form, to London where there’s a fellow shape-shifter who can help her, Jacob and the other peculiars must travel through time loops, escape from wights and hollowgasts, and navigate World War II-ravaged England. Their thrilling journey is interspersed with authentic vintage photos that the author found over many years and borrowed from fellow collectors.
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Riggs does not incorporate the black-and-white images seamlessly as simple illustration. They are often surprising, appearing at specific points in order to make readers pause in horror, humor, or despair. In one, two pairs of glowing eyes float in the black above a pile of skulls and bones. In another, a goggle-wearing dog with a pipe in its mouth gazes into the distance. And in yet another, a lone soldier stares at the debris on the altar of a bombed cathedral. It feels as if the photos came first and from them the story emerged, a warp through which the plot was woven.
HOLLOW CITY
Author:
Ransom Riggs
Publisher:
Quirk
Number of pages:
400 pp.
Book price:
$17.99
As fantastic as “Hollow City” is, it does have a flaw: This title does not stand on its own very well. Those who haven’t already devoured “Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children” will not only miss out on much of this book’s magic, they’ll also be confused. Like Peter and
Joel, two peculiar brothers who finish each other’s sentences and walk with their arms linked, the two volumes are inseparable.
For the legions awaiting it, however, this sophomore novel, which is even richer than Riggs’s imaginative debut, will not disappoint. The cinematic qualities of the writing are high-definition bold, the love story more dramatic, and the parallels between the war the peculiars are fighting against the wights and the one that England is waging against Germany add the weight of history to Jacob’s undertaking.
The characters were charming before, but here they are given greater depth. Their natures are, as Jacob says, “complexly shaded” and their moral decisions daunting. Does Miss Peregrine’s life matter more than scores of regular humans? Are her peculiar children obligated to fight a greater evil when they only want to undo one? These answers and many others will hopefully arrive in the next volume of the series.
In the tradition of so many other hero quests, “Hollow City” is about a teen who hopes for an extraordinary adventure and is forever changed after he finds himself on one. “I had grasped and pulled myself into a world once unimaginable to me, where I lived among people who were more alive than anyone I’d known, did things I’d never dreamed I could do, survived things I’d never dreamed I could survive,” says Jacob. And when readers are with him, they, too, get to experience wonderfully brave and peculiar lives.
Chelsey Philpot, whose debut young adult novel, “Even in Paradise,” will be published in the fall, can be reached at
philpotchelsey@gmail.com.
ARTICLE
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children review - Ransom Riggs
RACHEL ORVINO
POSTED ON JUNE 24, 2011 AT 4:00AM EDT
BLACK AND WHITE AND CREEPY ALL OVER Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
TYPE:BookCURRENT STATUS:In SeasonAUTHOR:Ransom RiggsPUBLISHER:QuirkGENRE:Fiction
WE GAVE IT A
B+
In this spooky debut novel from filmmaker and travel writer Riggs, 16-year-old Jacob — a witness to his grandfather’s horrifying death — journeys to a small Welsh island in search of answers. Were his grandfather’s stories about growing up in an orphanage populated by children with powers like invisibility and levitation actually true? What about the box of strange photos his grandfather possessed, including an image of someone with a mouth on the back of his head?
Those photos, in fact, are sprinkled throughout the book, adding a whimsical edge to the text and serving as an introduction to the ”children” Jacob befriends — not to mention Miss Peregrine herself (one image of the headmistress shows her hunched figure in silhouette, smoking a pipe). The images give depth to a novel that at times feels a little light on character development, possibly because Riggs, eyeing future volumes, spends extra time setting up the framework of his story.
With its X-Men: First Class-meets-time-travel story line, David Lynchian imagery, and rich, eerie detail, it’s no wonder Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has been snapped up by Twentieth Century Fox. This is a novel with ”movie adaptation” written into its powerful DNA. B+
Those Creepy Pictures Explained
The idea for Miss Peregrine’s Home popped into Ransom Riggs’ head when he ran across some sinister-looking vintage photos, which ”suggest stories even though you don’t know who the people are or exactly when they were taken.” As he began writing, he kept searching for images, even combing swap meets and flea markets. ”I was developing the story as I was finding the photos. I’d find a particularly evocative photo and I’d say, ‘I need to work this in somehow.’ ” Most are reproduced in the novel ”as is,” but a few have been digitally altered. Riggs says he ended up with more photos than he could use: ”I have a nice big fat backlog for the second book.” — Keith Staskiewicz
Film Review: Tim Burton’s ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’
Chief Film Critic
Peter Debruge
Chief Film Critic
@AskDebruge
Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar ChildrenCOURTESY OF 20TH CENTURY FOX
SEPTEMBER 25, 2016 | 08:00PM PT
Ransom Riggs' novel, about a group of special children with extraordinary powers, may as well have been written for Tim Burton to direct.
The title may read “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” but there can be no doubt for anyone buying a ticket: This is really Tim Burton’s Home for Peculiar Children. Not since “Sweeney Todd,” and before that all the way back to “Sleepy Hollow,” have the studios found such a perfect match of material for Hollywood’s most iconic auteur. It’s gotten to the point where the mere addition of Burton’s name to a movie title can justify an otherwise iffy prospect: You don’t want to see a “Planet of the Apes” remake? Well, how about a Tim Burton “Planet of the Apes” remake? Now you’re interested! Here, there’s nothing forced about the coupling of Ransom Riggs’ surprise best-seller with Burton’s playfully nonthreatening goth aesthetic and outsider sensibility, which should put the director back on the blockbuster charts.
One of the kid-lit sphere’s freshest recent surprises, Riggs’ novel was inspired by the author’s personal collection of vintage photographs — including a floating girl, an invisible boy, and other such darkroom dodges (not unlike retouch artist Mark Mothersbaugh’s “Beautiful Mutants” series) — and may as well have been written for Burton to direct. Known as “peculiars,” this eccentric mix of wartime refugees are like a cross between the Addams Family and the X-Men, each one blessed with some outré ability, from spontaneously igniting anything they touch to bringing inanimate objects (i.e. skeletons and dolls) to life.
While collateral damage from a Nazi bombing destroyed their beautiful Victorian orphanage during World War II, these kids have had few direct enemies, tucked away on the tiny Welsh island of Cairnholm, for more than seven decades. But that’s changed, now that a shape-shifting goon named Barron (Samuel L. Jackson) is on the hunt for peculiars, gobbling their eyes with great relish (and no one plays great relish, eye-gobbling or otherwise, like Jackson).
The kids have been safe all this time thanks to Miss Peregrine (embodied by Burton’s new muse, Eva Green), who possesses the gift of creating protective “loops,” or 24-hour safety bubbles wherein her charges can hide in a “Groundhog Day”-like cycle, forever repeating the day before the bomb struck. As guardians go, Miss Peregrine is what one might call an “ymbrine,” a rare breed of peculiar capable of transforming into a bird — in her case, a peregrine falcon, though there are others (including Miss Avocet, played by Judi Dench). Her ebony hair streaked with blue and swept up into a bird’s-nest ’do, Green cleverly suggests her avian alter ego, standing rigidly upright in her peacock-blue satin gown, glowering down through exaggerated eyeliner, and brandishing her long, slender fingers as if they were talons. Riggs may have imagined her, but she has clearly become a Burton creation, just one of many among her brood of adolescent oddities, who might otherwise be mistaken for so many sideshow freaks.
While hardly as elaborate (or inventive) as Hogwarts, Miss Peregrine’s eccentric quasi–orphanage shares the quality of remaining a well-kept secret from polite society. Even the other Cairnholm residents don’t realize who their neighbors are, so none can imagine why a boy named Jacob Portman (Asa Butterfield, who has literally grown up — if not necessarily into those endearingly big ears of his — since starring in Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”) would travel all the way from Florida to visit what remains of the old house. An aspiring “discoverer,” Jacob is reeling from the murder of his paranoid old grandfather, Abe (Terence Stamp), who died trying to defend himself from a long-limbed, eyeball-snatching creature called a hollowgast. (Of all the film’s design improvements, the hollowgast represents its most inspired, looking like a malicious, tentacle-mouthed twist on “The Nightmare Before Christmas” pumpkin king Jack Skellington.) No one quite believes Jacob’s firsthand account, though he cleverly manipulates his therapist (a hilariously “understanding” Allison Janney) into endorsing the trip to Wales, on the condition that his washed-up dad (Chris O’Dowd) accompanies him.
In the grand tradition of kid heroes who must circumvent their fuddy-duddy parents in order to accomplish great feats, Jacob manages to ditch his dad and locate Miss Peregrine’s loop, stepping back into 1943 to meet the children who had once been Abe’s closest companions. Some traits are undeniably genetic, and Jacob has inherited both his grandfather’s peculiarity and his taste in women. In fact, given the time-travel conceit, Jacob has the unique opportunity to swoon for the very same girl that Abe had loved so many years ago, a borderline-albino blonde bombshell named Emma (Ella Purnell), for whom screenwriter Jane Goldman (“Stardust”) has devised some deliciously romantic interactions, including a splendid reverse-“Titanic” love scene that sets up several key elements of the film’s finale, including a skeleton battle to rival the imagination of Ray Harryhausen.
Goldman’s frequently amusing script is the secret ingredient that makes “Miss Peregrine” such an appropriate fit for Burton’s peculiar sensibility, allowing the director to revisit and expand motifs and themes from his earlier work: With its time-skipping chronology and family-reconciling framing device, the entire tale could be another of Burton’s “Big Fish” stories (from the film of the same name); it offers opportunities for “Frankenweenie”-style stop-motion; there are ostracized freaks (and even a dino-shaped topiary) straight out of “Edward Scissorhands”; and its elaborate, meticulously decorated mansion manages to improve upon the wonky houses seen in “Beetlejuice” and “Dark Shadows.”
Perhaps it’s all a little bit too familiar for those who’ve been following Burton since the beginning. Although the director repeats more than he innovates this time around, for younger audiences, the film makes a terrific introduction to his blue-hued, forever-Halloween aesthetic. It’s clearly also an excuse for him to work with Green again after “Dark Shadows,” and rather than leaving audiences with the icky feeling that he’s twisting his leading lady to fit his admittedly kooky sensibility (as seemed to happen with Helena Bonham Carter and Lisa Marie), he appears to have met his match in Green. The already-outré “Penny Dreadful” star walks that razor-fine line between dignity and camp perhaps better than any other current actress — making for a partnership we can only hope to see continue.
LIBRARY OF SOULS BY RANSOM RIGGS BOOK REVIEW
REBECCA SKANE YOUNG ADULT FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION 0 COMMENTS MAY 31, 2016
And this is it. The grand finale of the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series by Ransom Riggs, the first of which has already been produced as a major motion picture about to be released. The series became wildly popular on its initial release due to the quirky story and the images that were included in the read – real photos that had been doctored by the author to appear spooky. It was a gimmick – sure, but it worked. Quirk Books | Sept. 2015 | Hardcover | 458 pp
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #1) Book Review
Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #2) Book Review
Library of Souls begins at the cliffhanger end of Hollow City – and you might want to refresh yourself on that last chapter if it’s been a while. Jacob, Emma, and the peculiar dog Addison are back in present day and cornered by a Hollow (baddie type #1 in this series) – but this Hollow isn’t moving. Jacob discovered at the very last minute, just before potentially being devoured by the Hollow, that he has the peculiar ability to speak their tongue and control them. No one can see them except for a few special peculiars, and Jacob is the only one left. Hence – he is the protector of Peculiars.
The rest of their group is gone, stolen by the Wights (baddie type #2 – evolved Hollows) and taken who knows where. With Addison’s trusty snout, they carefully move away from the Hollow and search for the trail that might lead to their friends. Addison leads them to a Peculiar ferryman.
It isn’t Charon the Ferryman, but Sharon, and he takes them to a sort of Hell for Peculiars which is precisely where the scent leads. It is here where dangers lurk around every corner, from a dangerous drug made from the souls of Peculiars, to flesh dealers, to thieves and muggers, to Wights and Hollows. The bigger plot is revealed when they run across Bentham, Miss Peregrine’s third brother, and his magical house of time loop connections. Bentham fills Jacob and Emma in on the story of how their other brother became evil, why it happened, the creation of the Hollows and Wights, and where all of the missing Peculiar children and Ymbrynes are being held.
Jacob and Emma set out to take down an entire fortress filled with Hollows and Wights – just the two of them. But there’s a bright spot. Jacob now knows that he can control the Hollows, and the fortress is filled with them. The monsters switch sides and fight alongside the Peculiars.
What can I say? I wasn’t as thrilled as I hoped I would be. It could be that I waited too long between books, and my connection to the characters was lost. But I think the truth of the matter is that this isn’t a very good story. Each problem solved was done so with a sudden deus ex machina it seemed, and the story just ran in the same direction it had been going without any twists or reveals to keep the reader interested. It was a bit boring. I will say, however, that I did like the conclusion after the climax. It held a good amount of satisfaction in it.
At any rate, I’m glad I’ve finished the series. I’m looking forward to the movie but reader beware: They switched roles and powers of some of the more important Peculiars!
MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children Movie Review
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children Movie Poster
MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN (2016)
Cast
Eva Green as Miss Peregrine
Asa Butterfield as Jake
Ella Purnell as Emma Bloom
Enoch O'Conner as Finlay MacMillan
Olive Abroholos Elephanta as Lauren McCrostie
Samuel L. Jackson as Barron
Allison Janney as Dr. Golan
Aiden Flowers as 10-Year-Old Jacob
Terence Stamp as Abraham Portman
Judi Dench as Miss Avocet
Chris O'Dowd as Franklin Portman
Director
Tim Burton
Writer (based upon the novel written by)
Ransom Riggs
Writer
Jane Goldman
Cinematographer
Bruno Delbonnel
Editor
Chris Lebenzon
Composer
Michael Higham
Matthew Margeson
Fantasy
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of fantasy action/violence and peril.
127 minutes
| Christy Lemire
September 30, 2016 | 89
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Walking back to the car after a recent screening of “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” my movie-savvy, nearly-seven-year-old son took my hand and asked me sweetly: “Mommy, what was that about?”
Um … er … well …
The short answer (which probably wasn’t terribly helpful to him) was: It’s “X-Men” meets “Groundhog Day.” The real answer, which required a lot of stumbling and bumbling and twists and turns, was far more lengthy (and probably not terribly helpful, either). Because even though I’d just seen the exact same movie my son had, I wasn’t sure I completely understood it, either.
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The latest adventure from Tim Burton would seem tailor-made for his tastes but it’s a convoluted slog, dense in mythology and explanatory dialogue but woefully lacking in thrills. It’s been a matter of diminishing returns with Burton for the past several years now between “Alice in Wonderland,” “Dark Shadows” and “Big Eyes” (although the animated “Frankenweenie” found the director in peak retro form). “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” allows him to show only brief glimmers of the gleefully twisted greatness of his early work such as “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and “Beetlejuice.” The characters here are supposed to be delightful—or at least interesting—simply because they’re superficially odd, and it just isn’t enough anymore. Too often, it feels like we’ve seen this movie before—and seen it done better.
Although the film (based on the novel by Ransom Riggs) is populated by an assortment of peculiars, as they’re known—kids born with unusual abilities that make it difficult for them to live in the outside world—precious few of them feel like actual human beings whose lonely plight might carry some emotional resonance. There’s Emma (Ella Purnell), the pretty blonde who has to wear lead shoes so she doesn’t fly away. There’s Olive (Lauren McCrostie), the redhead who has to wear gloves so she doesn’t accidentally set things on fire. There’s the girl with a ravenous maw hidden on the back of her head. The invisible boy who likes to play tricks. The girl who can make things grow super fast. The boy who can project images through his eyeball. The creepy, masked twins. They flit in and out, do the thing they do, and ta da! Then they’re gone without leaving much impact.
Their leader is the stylish and formidable Miss Alma LeFay Peregrine, played by Eva Green, who nearly saves the day simply by showing up with that vampy, riveting screen presence of hers. With a shocking swoop of midnight-blue hair and an array of gorgeous gowns from frequent Burton costume designer Colleen Atwood, she has the ability to manipulate time (and turn into a bird, which seems unrelated). But that isn’t enough. She also has to be extra quirky by smoking a pipe.
And the seemingly regular kid who stumbles upon all these freaks and geeks is the incredibly boring Jake, played by “Hugo” star Asa Butterfield. He’s our wide-eyed conduit, so of course he has to function as the straight man in such a wildly fanciful world. But there’s just nothing to him, and the young British actor’s American accent seems to flatten him further.
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You may have noticed I haven’t tried to describe the plot yet. Yes, I am procrastinating.
Shy, teenage Jake lives in a bland tract house in suburban Florida (on the same street as Edward Scissorhands, possibly). He dreams of being an explorer, he says, but he would seem to lack the requisite get-up-and-go. All his life, he’s heard his beloved grandfather (Terence Stamp, who departs far too quickly) tell him outlandish stories about his own youth on an island off the coast of Wales, where he grew up at an orphanage for misfits with magical powers.
After Grandpa dies under mysterious circumstances, Jake convinces his parents (Chris O’Dowd and a frustratingly underused Kim Dickens), with the help of his grief counselor (Allison Janney), that he should visit the island and try to find this mysterious home in hopes of achieving closure. Dad tags along to take photographs of birds and drink beer at the pub full of crotchety locals. (Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, whose work includes the Coen brothers’ luscious “Inside Llewyn Davis,” does make the foggy Welsh setting look severe and dramatic.)
When Jake finally does find the stately, gothic home his grandfather had told him about, he discovers it’s in ruins, the result of a bombing decades earlier during World War II. But once he steps inside and begins investigating, the inhabitants dare to pop their heads out and the place comes colorfully to life. Seems they’re stuck in a time loop, doomed to repeat the same day in September 1943 right up until the moment the Nazi bomb fell on them. The time-conscious Miss Peregrine explains that she winds the clock back 24 hours at the end of each night, just before the moment of destruction, allowing everyone to relive that day all over again.
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Doesn’t that sound fun? Are you still paying attention?
Anyway, for some reason, all the kids want Jake to stick around, ostensibly because they haven’t seen a fresh face in about 70 years, and his will do. But they’re all in danger, you see, because just as there are good mutants in the “X-Men” world, there are also bad ones. Here, they’re the peculiars who use their powers to take over other time loops, or something. And they way the stay alive is by eating people’s eyeballs, or something. Their leader is the courtly yet menacing Mr. Barron, whom Samuel L. Jackson plays with the kind of scenery chewing he could do in his sleep. But what they want is never clear, so they’re never truly frightening.
The supposedly epic collision between good and evil results in exactly one exciting action set piece. It involves stop-motion animated skeletons battling an army of long-limbed, eye-gouging mercenary giants at a boardwalk amusement park, and it’s the only scene that vividly recalls the kind of artistry and absurd humor that long have been Burton’s trademarks. And the peculiar who makes it all happen has the most useful—and the most ethically intriguing—ability of all. Enoch (Finlay MacMillan) can bring things back to life—a person, a creepy doll—by inserting a beating heart into it. Unfortunately, though, he ends up being just another cog in the particularly dull machinery.
'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children': Film Review
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8:00 PM PDT 9/25/2016 by Todd McCarthy
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Close, but no cigar. TWITTER
9/30/2016
Tim Burton's latest is about a boy who travels back in time to discover a World War II-era school for eccentric children, presided over by a shape-shifting headmistress (Eva Green).
For at least the first hour, perhaps a bit more, Tim Burton seems well on his way to making one of his best films in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. The director, whose style has remained distinctively recognizable across 18 features in 30 years even as his inspiration has varied, seems entirely in synch with the most pertinent aspects of Ransom Riggs' 2011 young adult best seller, especially with the odd vintage photographic elements the author so spookily employed, and the eccentric British setting is right up the director's alley. But, alas, then the beauty and the bane of mass market contemporary cinema — CGI and enormous special effects — take over and marginalize the genuine narrative conviction that has up to then been generated in this cleverly conceived confection.
The Fox release should generate some robust initial business based on the built-in teen fan base as well as Burton fans, but whether it's enough to spur sequels to the two remaining books in the trilogy is an open question.
There are unmistakable Harry Potteresque influences at play in Riggs' text — for a start, a boy with uncomprehending elders at home, an old British school populated with a teacher and kids of very particular talents, goings-on that outsiders mustn't know about and evil creatures needing to be kept at bay. At the same time, certain themes and human conditions are ripe for the picking by the likes of Burton, beginning with the oddball kid of impatient parents, a celebration of eccentricity and the downright weird, and a partiality toward style so outre it's cool.
Like any number of previous young Burton leads, Jake Portman (Asa Butterfield, Hugo) is rather a problem child, not remotely understood by his parents (Chris O'Dowd, Kim Dickens) but very close to his paternal grandfather Abraham (Terence Stamp), who lives with them all in suburban Florida. Jake never tires of hearing Grandpa's fabulous stories about how, after having gotten out of Poland just before World War II, he'd lived in a house with “the special children” before joining the British army.
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Grandpa has always referred to the “monsters” he fought in the war, and has mysterious old photographs of freakish human oddities and supernatural-like phenomena that would make David Lynch jealous. But when pressed for more details, Grandpa says he doesn't want to talk about it, which everyone has always understood as his way of referring to Holocaust-related horrors he witnessed and narrowly escaped. Jake thinks there's more to it than that, so when Grandpa dies (his eyes mysteriously turned into black holes), annoyed Dad carts his son off to Wales, the location of Grandpa's old school, to put the matter to rest once and for all.
Already, unusual ripples are coursing through the film, especially in regard to the father's disdain for his son; the way O'Dowd plays him, it's as if he's got a physical allergy to the boy. Under the circumstances, it's easy to see why Jake has gravitated to the far more interesting Grandpa.
The principal object of Jake's interest is the school Grandpa attended, which was hit by German bombs on Sept. 3, 1943. Indeed, when Jake and his dad inspect it, they find only a shell. But when Jake sneaks back on his own, he's able to enter a portal that lands him back on that fateful day some 70 years earlier. And in the then-gorgeous school, he meets its inhabitants, who are both decidedly peculiar and rather enchanting. Ruling the roost is the stunning, pipe-smoking, black-attired headmistress Miss Peregrine (Eva Green), who welcomes the outsider and explains the “recessive” gene of peculiarity; she, when the occasion calls for it, can transform into a falcon.
Most interesting among the perennial students is blonde-tressed Emma (Ella Purnell), whose unbearable lightness is such that she must wear heavy metal boots to keep from floating off into space. She and Abraham were “close” before the bombardment and she's sworn off attachments ever since. Among the others blessed and cursed with the recessive gene of peculiarity are an invisible boy and Enoch (Finlay MacMillan), a junior taxidermist who creates doll-sized creatures and makes them fight. Burton could have made a short film just about him.
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The key to the story lies in Miss Peregrine's ability to manipulate time. Specifically, each day, for her, her students and the school, it's still Sept. 3, 1943. By stopping her watch a matter of seconds before the Nazi bombers are to strike, she can turn back the clock 24 hours and life can go on; they can continue to live, learn, do interesting things and they do not age, but if they leave they'll quickly get old and die, hence the tension when Emma and outsider Jake become involved.
Burton pulls off the crucial time-stopping with tremendous flair and also develops a nicely low-key relationship between Jake and Emma. For a time, an appealing gentleness prevails that's rooted in this unique inter-generational romance, a feeling augmented in particular by Purnell's slow-blooming flower of a performance, and if the film had remained focused more on the improbabilities of this love story, it might have emerged as something rather special.
Instead, the script by Jane Goldman (co-writer of two X-Men and two Kingsman entries) makes a screeching third-act turn into tiresomely conventional big action territory with the arrival of a blue/white-eyed, fright wigged, pointy-toothed, lobster claw-armed villain named Barron (Samuel L. Jackson) and other “bad peculiars.” Some sort of narrative excuse is invented for their sudden appearance, but the entire climax, played out at the Blackpool Tower and pier and centered on a funhouse, seems dragged in from some other movie and is an entirely unwelcome adjunct to the more rarified narrative pursued up to this point. This manufactured-feeling evil seems like it's come from some other world and seriously deflates the sensitivity and delicacy of what's come before.
To be sure, the effects throughout are marvelous, notably the portrayal of Emma's weightlessness, Miss Peregrine's phenomenal transformation into a falcon and the resurrection of a sunken ocean liner from the ocean floor. Colleen Atwood's costumes are sensational, notably the great dark garb she's created for Eva Green, as are Gavin Bocquet's production design and Bruno Delbonnel's cinematography.
Still, the heightened, fantastical elements of the story, coupled with the British wartime setting, put one in mind of Michel Powell, and one knows that, with him, the focus would have remained intently on the young lovers to the end, not on a detour into special effects.
Opens: September 30 (Fox)
Production: Chernin Entertainment
Cast: Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Chris O'Dowd, Allison Janney, Rupert Everett, Terence Stamp, Ella Parnell, Judi Dench, Samuel L. Jackson, Kim Dickens, O-Lan Jones, Finlay MacMillan, Lauren McCrostie, Georgia Pemberton, Milo Parker, Pixie Davies, Jack Brody, Hayden Keeler-Stone, Raffiella Chapman
Director: Tim Burton
Screenwriter: Jane Goldman, based on the book by Ransom Riggs
Producers: Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping
Executive producers: Derek Frey, Katterli Frauenfelder, Nigel Gostelow, Ivana Lombardi
Director of photography: Bruno Delbonnel
Production designer: Gavin Bocquet
Costume designer: Colleen Atwood
Editor: Chris Lebenzon
Music: Michael Higham, Matthew Mangeson
Casting: Susie Figgis
PG-13 rating, 126 minutes