Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Posted 4 weeks ago, under fiction
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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggsby Ransom Riggs
ISBN: 9781594744761

The weird vintage photographs on the book cover drew me in. They are compellingly weird: whole-head masks and a coiled tube; a sad, jacketed boy in a bunny costume, and an eerily doubled reflection among others. If you don’t think these photos sound interesting, you can safely skip this book and the rest of this post. If you do think it sounds interesting, you’re probably wondering if it is as good as it seems.

The story is good — there are more strange photographs, and secrets, and special abilities. If this sounds at all familiar, it must be because you’ve read some of the most popular young adult titles ever: not just Harry Potter, but Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, too. And it appears it will be the first in a series, as a bidding war for the movie rights resulted in the announcement of a sequel. (I believe the book is nearly always better, though if Riggs gets his wish and Tilda Swinton plays Miss Peregrine, I will definitely go see it in the theater.)

So it is a good story. I want to say the book is great, but the writing falls a bit short of the magic I’d want to feel to say it was great. (By way of comparison, I thought Catherynne M. Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making had that magic.) If you want a good story, are intrigued by monsters, or are curious to see how a writer weaves a story from found artifacts (the photographs are all real vintage images) you’d probably like this.

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It Chooses You

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It Chooses You, Miranda Julyby Miranda July
ISBN: 9781936365012

This book is what happened as a result of July’s struggling to finish the screenplay for what would become her second movie, The Future. Of the screenplay, she tells us:

Again and again it was respectfully suggested to me that I cut Paw-Paw’s monologue. But I couldn’t kill him twice, and I thought his voice might be the distressing, ridiculous, problematic soul of what I was trying to make. Not that my conviction protected me; it’s always embarrassing to pin a tail onto thin air, nowhere near the donkey It might be wrong, it sure looks like it is — but then again, maybe the donkey’s in the wrong place, or there are two donkeys, and the tail just got there first.

I suspect July is the kind of artist you either really like, or she bugs the shit out of you. Reasons she may bug you: she seems to get away with doing whatever she wants; she does more than one kind of thing (writing, directing, creating art installations); she creates characters who could use a good proverbial smack upside the head at times; she might be considered twee; the Paw-Paw mentioned above is a cat.

I like her. I loved her short story collection No one belongs here more than you. This book, while all about stories, isn’t fiction. July is telling the story of being stuck in one creative pursuit and what emerges are many other stories, often of people being somehow stuck in their lives.

She and her assistant and a photographer go meet people who are selling things in the PennySaver: these are the stories she hears as a result. The PennySaver is the poor internet-less person’s Craigslist. Through her, we meet people selling old blowdryers, photo albums, leather jackets, tadpoles. They are sad, strange, funny, a bit repulsive, heartbreaking. July reveals what she is really looking for, by finding them:

All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life — where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.

I think this is the reason I like Miranda July. I want to know the same thing.

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