PAGE 9 • May 2020
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The Write Stuff by NANCY ROBERTS
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs Published: 2011 Yes, I’m coming very late to the “Miss Peregrine” party. I discovered the book on an early-virus-stockup trip to BJ’s, and was intrigued by the cover (a little girl, in an Art Deco crown that reminded me of the illustrations in my mother’s 100-year-old copy of “Dorothy and The Wizard in Oz,” floating in the air). It was sufficiently strange, as was the choice of font for the title and, naturally, the name of the book. Along with the name of the author: Ransom Riggs. I also admit to trying to find out of the author’s name is real, but all the public information I can discover about him reads almost identically, and gives no clues except that, as a child who attended a school for gifted children, he probably based some of his story biographically. Which, of course, is not to say his real life could possibly have been as odd, off, and more than slightly scary as is his novel. Still, the name “Ransom” carries with it the hero of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, a payment made to rescue someone, and the sacrifice of self for the good of
others. So it makes you wonder. Young adult fiction, I’m convinced, is really written for those adults - like me who never entirely grew up as readers. We still love to dwell in fantastical worlds, where heroes win, magic is real, and things go bump in the night. Nevertheless, the book is classified “young adult,” and here I would caution parents of young readers to read along with your impressionable kids. When the Harry Potter series came out, I wrote a group review of novels over an approximately 80 year span that dealt with magical children who save the world. It’s a theme that has been worked, and reworked, many times, yet never grows old. While there are nail-biting elements in these stories, they essentially are goodagainst-evil tales, where we’re rooting for the good
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