Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

I've been meaning to get around to reading this thing for at least a year. It's not bad, but I'm not sure it deserved the acclaim that it got. It felt pretty derivative to me (which, I mean, it's a book for kids– derivative is okay since most kids haven't read quite as much as a thirty year old librarian), but despite the fact that everything I saw said that the plot and characters where amazing, the only really interesting twist was the use of “vintage” photos. It felt like an X-Men story with a couple elements from the Supernatural tv show. Which is not to say it was all bad– the characters are pretty believable, minus the romance plot where the main character falls in love with his grandfather's eternally 15 childhood sweetheart, and the subplot about the fact the grandfather living through WWII as a young Jewish kid with powers was fascinating. But a lot of the loose ends are never tied up, and the end seemed really rushed.

I might be more satisfied with it if I read the sequel that came out in January, but it didn't hook me anywhere near enough to make me go out of my way like that.