This YA book was not what I was expecting! At least not when it started. I’d seen it on shelves for years, but I think I was expecting a haunted orphanage, third-person sort of fairy tale. When I began reading, I wasn’t prepared for as lovably flawed of a narrator as Jacob Portman, a wealthy Florida teenager who’s trying to get fired from his job. The writing was excellent and the book was, to steal a word from author Aimee Easterling, unputdownable. I was addicted to the story about the strange photographs of creepy children Jake’s grandfather kept, and how Jake witnesses his grandpa’s grisly and mysterious death, and especially his therapy sessions with Dr. Golan, after which Jake and his dad agree to visit the Welsh island of Cairnholm where Jake’s grandfather had once lived as a WWII child refugee.
Riggs’s writing is some of the best I’ve read. The book is enhanced by dozens of strange photographs procured by the author, which help the story unfold and come to life. In the second act, things take a turn for the wackier when Jake discovers a time loop in a cairn and is transported back to September 3, 1940. There, he meets Miss Peregrine -a Minerva McGonagall type of headmistress – and the same peculiar children, all with superhuman powers, from his grandpa’s photographs. This includes the feisty Emma, who was once his grandpa’s sweetheart, but who now has eyes for Jake. The witty dialogue, old-fashioned figures of speech, and U.K. slang really stood out among the new cast of characters, to the point where I felt I could really hear the kids speaking in their accents, each in his or her own unique voice.
I was fairly obsessed with the majority of the novel, until I came to the third act, and it began to play out more like an average YA fantasy novel. I had been more intrigued when Jake was straddling his real, present world and the time-loop world; but once we plunged into the full-fledged peculiarverse, I was ready for a resolution. I don’t plan on finishing this series soon, but I can see why this book is so acclaimed. Ransom Riggs writes with phenomenal skill!
Memorable Quotes
“‘They may love you,’ she whispered, ‘but they’ll never understand.'” – p. 263
“Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize that we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries – but not until now had I realized how full of them earth was.” – p. 338
Spirited little Rachel Kalama’s life changes for the worst when, in 1890s Hawai’i, she is discovered to have leprosy. The disease breaks up the Kalama family as it makes them anathema, which no one in their community wants to touch. Young Rachel is deported to the secluded island of Moloka’i, never to be permitted to touch her family or loved ones again.
When author Mary Ann Shaffer passed away, her niece, Annie Barrows, took up the mantle of completing the novel her aunt had been researching and writing. The resulting product of their joint efforts is this delightful little story, entitled The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. We meet a variety of characters, including our lovable and humorous main narrator, Juliet, through letters, journals and correspondences.
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden is one of my all-time favorite novels. It is the story of a young, poor Japanese girl who is sold into a geisha district, and grows to become one of the topmost successful geisha. Beginning in the Great Depression, this is a work of historical fiction spanning across the World War II and post-World War II eras.
This is one of my favorite DA reading experiences. Piper lives with her father, a preacher, and her brother and sister. There are many Japanese Americans in her neighborhood and school, and her church is mostly Japanese. But after Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, life begins to change for Piper, as now she is considered suspicious and a traitor for associating with her Japanese friends and her father’s congregation, even though they are American citizens. And then, to her horror, her beloved Japanese American friends and neighbors are unjustly forced from their homes into internment facilities.
It is 1941, and just as Amber Billows and her family are beginning to adjust to their new life in Washington, D.C. (after having moved between multiple other cities), Amber’s father, a quirky Harvard-educated reporter, announces that they are moving yet again, this time to the virtually unheard of U.S. territory of Hawaii. Amber is quick to be upset, but is also quick to adjust to her new life in fair-weathered, lovely Hawaii, especially as she makes friends with pretty and popular Kame, a Japanese-American girl from school. Life is quite ordinary, until the fateful morning when Amber is awoken by a deafening, high-pitched droning sound and her panicked mother calling her out of bed. From that moment on, everything changes in Hawaii, from citizens having to build bomb shelters and carry around gas masks, to waiting in hours-long lines for groceries, medical treatment, and gasoline. Worse, however, are the tragic deaths and wounded sufferings of the soldiers who were stationed at Pearl Harbor, as Amber learns while assisting her mother, a nurse, in treating these men at the hospital.
Maddie Beck and her mother live in a boarding house on Long Island, New York, while her father, a naval officer, is stationed overseas in the Pacific. Out of devotion to her father, Maddie makes friends in her new town and, with her new beau Johnny, starts a group for young people to help with the war effort. Everything seems to be going grand, and Maddie is flat-out enjoying the busyness and romanticism of the war, until near-tragedy strikes her own family, and she realizes that war is devastation, not fun and games. This book was a delight to read and is a great addition to the series.
This book is most unlike the other books in the series. As it begins, Julie is a privileged, well-to-do Jewish girl in Vienna, the daughter of a successful doctor, when Hitler annexes Austria and her world is turned upside-down. After witnessing the heinous atrocities committed by the Nazis upon their Jewish neighbors, Julie’s father sends her overseas for her safety, to live with her estranged aunt and uncle in New York City. While Julie starts out as a rather snobbish girl, boasting of her own intelligence and concerned about trivial matters, the reader, knowing where history is headed, expects a major transformation once the girl loses her luxurious lifestyle and witnesses the terrors of the Nazis. But the expected transformation does not exactly occur; instead, Julie goes from being snobby, verbose and unlikable, to completely depressed and withdrawn.