Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Thanks Helen Corbett for recommending this to me.  I ordered it from the library and have devoured it in less than a week.  What fun it was and it's put me in a really good mood. (Two fun and mental books in a row!) This book had to be read in print format because it was full of the most weird and bizarre old photos, which had been lovingly collected and cared for by the author and others.

They are really odd and freaky pictures which the author uses to add atmosphere and a cinematic edge to his completely bonkers story.  The pictures themselves are totally bizarre but make complete sense when you enter into the kind of X-men world off this unknown (made up?) island off the coast of Wales.

The American teenage hero witnesses the murder of his Grandad and vows to travel to the Children's home on a far flung Welsh Island to find out the history and reason behind his Grandad's interesting life and violent death.

This book is American, and the first part is set in Florida, I loved the descriptions of life on a housing estate for a teenager in downtown Miami. I especially liked his descriptions of the multi ethnic  Santas on his neighbours roof! 

The jump to village life in Wales is  a really off the wall shift but it works.  I loved it. I  haven't whipped through a book so quickly in ages! It is written for a teenage audience but even so parts of it are pretty grim.  You do need a strong stomach.  (Especially when you see the kid in action whose specific peculiarity is bringing dead people back to life by inserting fresh cow and sheep hearts into their cadavers! ) Parts of it reminded me of an American Werewolf in London, other bits were X-men, other bits a bit Enid Blyton'! . But the story itself was really inventive and based around a  24 hour time loop stuck on 3rd September 1940, which is accessible from the back of a cave on this weird Welsh Island. All of the kids are safely cocooned within this time loop, lovely reset every evening by Miss Peregrine, who is a woman who can change to a peregrine falcon. 

I loved this guy's writing style.  It was really good fun and totally and absolutely off the wall! OK , it's written for teenagers but hey, no worries that's what I still am at heart and it instantly took me back to the feeling I got when I sucked up books like a hoover when I was 13.