Jacob Portman has a rather unusual grandfather named Abe, and according to Abe, his past was literally magical. He was born in Poland just before WWII, and had to escape the Nazis. He was sent to an island off the coast of Wales, where, as he tells his grandson, the sun shone all day and everything was perfect. And the kids there did magical things; Abe even has photographs to prove it--invisible boys and such. At first, Jake is fascinated by these tales, even though a part of them gives him nightmares--the monsters. In Abe's early stories to young Jake, horrible monsters with loose black skin and many tentacle-like tongues were what chased him away from his family and to the island off of Wales. But as Jake gets older and wiser, he figures out that Abe's stories must be embellished, and that the creepy monsters were really just men with guns and uniforms, who Abe later went to fight when WWII finally came. Only then something awful happens: Abe is murdered in the middle of the woods. Jake and his friend Ricky arrive just in time to see the old man die, and Jake sees something terrifying in the woods that runs away before he can get a proper look--it's one of the monsters Abe always told him about. But Ricky didn't catch a glimpse of the creature, and so Jake gets a psychologist named Dr. Golan who diagnoses the boy with acute stress reaction, and pronounces the "monster" in the woods a product of that, and after a while, Jake is convinced that he saw nothing. His grandpa was killed by wild animals, nothing else. But Abe's last words are still haunting him, and he cannot figure them out. On his sixteenth birthday, Jake receives a gift from his grandpa: a book of Ralph Waldo Emerson's writing, and inside there is a letter, fifteen years old, from someone named Alma Peregrine. Soon, Jake and his father plan a trip for a few weeks to the Welsh island of Cairnholm. Mr. Portman wants to research birds there, and Jake plans to figure out what really happened to his grandfather when Abe was a child, and so he finds Miss Peregrine's home for peculiar children.
This is one of those books that I meant to read and meant to read ever since it came out, and I just never got around to it until last month. It really catches your eye at the bookstore--among all the kid/YA books that have cover pictures of either plucky young protagonists looking confused and carrying magical instruments, or very ordinary and harassed-faced teens trying their best to be attractive, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children really stands out in that its cover is a vintage photograph of a levitating little girl in a tiara, floating blank-faced among some trees. "Wow," you say to yourself. "That must be one strange book." And you pick it up, and you flip through it, and things get even weirder as you notice all the old and creepy photographs, largely of kids doing impossible things like lifting huge boulders or having two reflections in water. Actually, these pictures aren't nearly as creepy and weird when you read the book, because they connect to the story, and you just go, "Oh, yeah, there's Hugh with his bees all over him, like usual."
Jacob Portman has a rather unusual grandfather named Abe, and according to Abe, his past was literally magical. He was born in Poland just before WWII, and had to escape the Nazis. He was sent to an island off the coast of Wales, where, as he tells his grandson, the sun shone all day and everything was perfect. And the kids there did magical things; Abe even has photographs to prove it--invisible boys and such. At first, Jake is fascinated by these tales, even though a part of them gives him nightmares--the monsters. In Abe's early stories to young Jake, horrible monsters with loose black skin and many tentacle-like tongues were what chased him away from his family and to the island off of Wales. But as Jake gets older and wiser, he figures out that Abe's stories must be embellished, and that the creepy monsters were really just men with guns and uniforms, who Abe later went to fight when WWII finally came. Only then something awful happens: Abe is murdered in the middle of the woods. Jake and his friend Ricky arrive just in time to see the old man die, and Jake sees something terrifying in the woods that runs away before he can get a proper look--it's one of the monsters Abe always told him about. But Ricky didn't catch a glimpse of the creature, and so Jake gets a psychologist named Dr. Golan who diagnoses the boy with acute stress reaction, and pronounces the "monster" in the woods a product of that, and after a while, Jake is convinced that he saw nothing. His grandpa was killed by wild animals, nothing else. But Abe's last words are still haunting him, and he cannot figure them out. On his sixteenth birthday, Jake receives a gift from his grandpa: a book of Ralph Waldo Emerson's writing, and inside there is a letter, fifteen years old, from someone named Alma Peregrine. Soon, Jake and his father plan a trip for a few weeks to the Welsh island of Cairnholm. Mr. Portman wants to research birds there, and Jake plans to figure out what really happened to his grandfather when Abe was a child, and so he finds Miss Peregrine's home for peculiar children.
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Paper Towns was my first John Green book. I thought that such a popular author could not be any good, since most of the time, I cannot stand the bestsellers in the YA section of the bookstore (e.g., The Hunger Games. I know, I know--I don't like The Hunger Games. I'm sorry, everyone). But my friend (who also doesn't much like The Hunger Games) gave me Paper Towns as a birthday present, and I was utterly amazed. I had no idea that John Green wrote about such deep ideas as philosophies of life! What? This was new to me. It's been almost a year since I read Paper Towns, and since then, the only Green book I've read has been An Abundance of Katherines. From what I've seen, AAoK is one of his less popular books, but I really enjoyed it.
Colin Singleton just graduated from high school and got dumped by a girl named Katherine for the nineteenth time. Ever since he began dating, his girlfriends have have only been named Katherine, and it has to be spelled exactly like that, and she can't go by a nickname like Kat or anything. But weird dating type aside, Colin is no ordinary boy. He is a prodigy, and has always been super-smart. He tries to read 400 pages a day, and he learns facts like crazy. Unfortunately, prodigies are not so cool forever, and Colin is beginning to figure this out for himself. If you're a genius, you invent things, and you're brilliant into your adult life. But prodigies...well, Colin feels like they never do anything really special. You get to be that ten-year-old who knows everything, but by the time you hit college, you're just like everyone else, and it sucks, since for your whole childhood you were called special and brilliant, and now...now you're not. And to make matters worse, this most recent Katherine who dumped him...well, he was actually in love with her. He knew that it was more than just a crush, more than the feelings he had for Katherines throughout elementary school, middle school, and the early years of high school. He is heartbroken, depressed, and feels useless. So when his friend Hassan Harbish shows up at his house shortly after the terrible dumping and offers to take Colin on a road trip to dispel his misery and perhaps find a new purpose, Colin readily agrees. The boys soon head out of their hometown of Chicago and find themselves in Gutshot, Tennessee, a little town that claims to contain the grave of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Colin and Hassan meet a girl named Lindsey Lee Wells, whose mom, Hollis, offers the boys the job of interviewing Gutshot residents to compile an oral history, and in exchange, she will pay them $500 per week and give them room and board at her house. Between interviewing, Colin is trying to come up with a formula he calls the Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which is supposed to show the progression of a relationship, and could also be used, Colin believes, to predict the future. At the same time, he's trying to convince Hassan to go to college. His friend has "taken a year off" and that one year looks like it may turn into two if Hassan isn't careful. While spending the summer in Gutshot, Colin discovers many things about Katherines, the Theorem, being a nearly-former prodigy, and the way he loves. |
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August 2017
AuthorI am Fiona, a 16-year-old person. I write reviews of books that I read. I love reading, writing, spoonerisms, word jokes, accents, In Which chapters, parentheses, long dashes, et ceteras, and acronyms. Categories
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