Most of us stop reading books with pictures by a certain age because it seems childish or immature. However, Ransom Riggs managed to incorporate fifty pictures into a young adult novel to create an amazing new world in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The story revolves around Jacob, a sixteen-year-old boy who struggles in school and must deal with his aging grandfather. His grandfather, Abe, always told Jacob stories about these peculiar people he met as a boy. He showed Jacob pictures of these children and their amazing abilities or peculiarities. As Jacob grew older, he didn’t believe his grandfather’s stories anymore. However, all of this changed when he was forced to accept that the “fiction” may actually be a reality. Jacob, who at the moment was dealing with a family tragedy, set out to find the truth behind his grandfather’s stories. He finds a strange new world embedded in his own and soon realizes that there is so much more to the stories than he realized.

Making a book entertaining to a young audience is a difficult task. However, Riggs was able to use old photographs to make his story come to life. The idea was brilliant and unique in this genre: using real photographs from different times or places and tying them all together in one story. Riggs managed to make a novel full of adventure and thrill based on a single idea. I have seen novels where the illustrations were simply there in the novel; but in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, the photographs influenced the novel. In an interview with Jason Rekulak, the creative director of Quirk Books, Ransom Riggs expressed that he had been collecting old photographs that mainly featured children and decided, “If I can’t know their real stories, I’ll make them up” (Riggs 358). I admire this form of literature because it allows the reader to use their imagination and also see the reality.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is an excellent novel that uses strange photographs to make a story come alive. There is a movie that brings the story to film, but nothing ever seems to beat the novel. The novel is strongly recommended for those who like to read about an alternate universe, like Harry Potter or The Mortal Instruments. It has character development, action, thrill, and even some romance. It is 382 pages but an easy read, considering readers will want to continue reading.