Ranch Librarian Reading Challenge 2016: A Book You Own But Have Never Read (Miss Peregrine's Trilogy)

Happy Fall!!!!

I am APPALLED it's already the middle of October, and even more appalled that I've been away from the blog so long.

If you've visited TRL before, then you know that the blog has had a facelift this fall! I wanted to make the blog a little simpler to read and more pleasant to look at, and hopefully, you all enjoy it as much as I do.

Over the summer, I spent most of my time on the ranch, reading and writing and enjoying the beautiful weather. Hubster and I didn't travel much, which was a great change of pace, and instead spent a lot of time farming (which is another story for another time).

During all the reading and writing time, I fell in love with Ransom Rigg's Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children Trilogy: 

I was wary of this trilogy at first. I remembering thinking, This book looks...weird.

But when I saw that the film version of the first book was going to be released in September, I decided I better get it read, because my students would soon be all about reading it. To my delight, when I began reading Miss Peregrine, I became totally sucked in. The kind of sucked in that has you desperate to get your hands on the next installment as fast as possible. 

Riggs' trilogy of novels are a part of a movement called Found Novels, which is kind of like Found Poetry. If you aren't familiar with Found Poetry, it's simple: the poems are created from a base work, such as a newspaper article, book, or letter. The writer blots out the words they don't want and saves the ones they do.

With Riggs' Found Novel, he used collections of antique photographs as the base. He sorted, dug through, and mined baskets of old photographs at antique stores and curio shops, as well as used some photographs from the collections of photograph curators. Riggs used the photos to guide what he was writing about, and from that, the novel was born.

I found this technique to be utterly fascinating. Not only did he write a fresh and compelling novel, but the photographs themselves are so interesting! The New York Times featured a review that focuses on the photographs from which Riggs worked; you can find it here.

The story of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is unique--a blend of fantasy, time-travel, sci-fi, and historical fiction. I found Miss Peregrine to be charming and slightly frightening in the same way Rowling's Minerva McGonagal stole so many hearts, and you can't help but root for Jacob and Emma, whose chemistry and dynamic are simple and complicated at the same time.

If you are a fan of Young Adult Literature, then this book is one to try, especially if you are going to watch the film this fall. After all, the book is (almost) always better than the movie!