Students Will Love "Peculiar Children"

Happy New Year, everyone!  I hope the school year has been a good one for you.  I'm back with a book review for a great story I enjoyed over the break.  Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is a delightful read, particularly for students who enjoy the fantastic and the creepy.  Miss Peregrine finds an intriguing balance between the two, and uses visual art to create a truly original experience for readers.

The story is tense, suspenseful, and emotional.  The author masterfully manipulates concepts of past and present, reality and illusion, splendor and horror, intricately weaving them all until they are indistinguishable in a lovely tapestry that makes the book hard to put down.  I highly recommend it, and I think it would be an ideal read-aloud for middle-grade classrooms.

If you're interested, rather than describe the plot for you, allow me to lead you to the author's excellent book trailer that convinced me to pick up the book.  The photos shown within it actually appear in the book!  Show the trailer to students and see if it gets them interested in reading this novel.  You could also pique their interest to read it by informing them that Tim Burton is in talks to direct the upcoming adaptation.  Check it out the trailer (not related to the film, which is still in the beginning stages):