Hollow City - Ransom Riggs

Hollow City

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children sat on my On Reserve list for a long time. When I finally read it this summer, I couldn't believe I had waited so long. The silver lining, though, was that my delay gave Ransom Riggs time to write a sequel. I picked it up almost immediately.

Hollow City picks up exactly where the first novel leaves off. Jacob and the other peculiar children are fleeing the island in the midst of an air raid and are being chased by wights. 

The book proceeds as the children run around England with little more than the clothes on their backs. They meet a menagerie of peculiar animals and visit the headquarters of the peculiar world, all guided by a book of peculiar fairy tales that turn out to have more meaning than expected.

The book has the same whimsy as its predecessor, but I felt some of the same magic of originality had dissipated. Now that the reader is more familiar with the world of peculiars, you are less surprised by the appearance of strange talents in new characters. I felt this took away some of that initial charm, but not to a point that made the book unenjoyable.

On the contrary, I quite liked both of these books. The series is fun and light-hearted. I like the addition of the old photographs. While I think Ransom works a little too hard to work them in sometimes, I am still captured by them and wonder where they possibly could have come from originally.

I look forward to the third book, even though it won't be out for about a year - so long to wait! I'm hoping Riggs can maintain the spirit of the stories and not get bogged down in some of the technical details of the world he created. I felt a tilt in that direction at times in Hollow City and I don't want him to forget that good stories are about the characters, not the mechanics of their time travel/powers/etc.

Have you read the Peculiar Children series? What do you think? Original or not?

Pages: 396

Date Completed: September 21, 2014