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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children Book 1) Kindle Edition

by Ransom Riggs (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 37,087 ratings

Book 1 of 6: Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children

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The #1 New York Times Best Seller is now a major motion picture from visionary director Tim Burton, starring Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Ella Purnell, Samuel L. Jackson, and Judi Dench.

Bonus features
• Q&A with author Ransom Riggs
• Eight pages of color stills from the film
• Sneak preview of Hollow City, the next novel in the series

A mysterious island.

An abandoned orphanage.

A strange collection of very curious photographs.

It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive. A spine-tingling fantasy illustrated with haunting vintage photography, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children will delight adults, teens, and anyone who relishes an adventure in the shadows.

“A tense, moving, and wondrously strange first novel. The photographs and text work together brilliantly to create an unforgettable story.”—John Green, New York Times best-selling author of The Fault in Our Stars

“With its X-Men: First Class-meets-time-travel story line, David Lynchian imagery, and rich, eerie detail, it’s no wonder Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has been snapped up by Twentieth Century Fox. B+”—Entertainment Weekly

“‘Peculiar’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. Riggs’ chilling, wondrous novel is already headed to the movies.”—People

“You’ll love it if you want a good thriller for the summer. It’s a mystery, and you’ll race to solve it before Jacob figures it out for himself.”—Seventeen

Book 1 of 6

Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children
Print length

358 pages
Language

English
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Publisher

Quirk Books
Publication date

June 7, 2011
Reading age

14 years and up
Grade level

9 - 12
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133389 KB
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Popular Highlights in this book

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They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood.
Highlighted by 3,427 Kindle readers
He made a grab for me, but slow and drunk is no match for fast and scared shitless.
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Males lack the seriousness of temperament required of persons with such grave responsibilities.
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From the Publisher


	Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children	Hollow City	Library of Souls	A Map of Days	The Conference of the Birds	The Desolations of Devil's Acre

Customer Reviews	37,087	20,527	18,333	7,333	6,727	5,095
Price	$5.69	$6.37	$5.98	$16.20	$13.89	$10.74
	Book 1 of the Miss Peregrine series. A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of very curious photographs. An unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience.	Book 2 of the Miss Peregrine series. Ten peculiar children flee an army of deadly monsters. And only one person can help them—but she’s trapped in the body of a bird.	Book 3 of the Miss Peregrine series. A boy with extraordinary powers. An army of deadly monsters. An epic battle for the future of peculiardom.	Book 4 of the Miss Peregrine series. New wonders, and dangers, await in this darkly brilliant next chapter for Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, illustrated with haunting vintage photographs- in full colour.	Book 5 of the Miss Peregrine series. With enemies behind him and the unknown ahead, Jacob Portman’s story continues as he takes a brave leap forward.	The fate of all peculiardom hangs in the balance as Jacob and his friends face deadly enemies and race through history's most dangerous loops in this epic conclusion to the #1 bestselling Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series.


	Tales of the Peculiar	Miss Peregrine's Museum of Wonders

Customer Reviews	2,832	333
Price	$11.94	$10.68
	A companion to the #1 bestselling Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children series!	A deluxe companion guide to the #1 bestselling Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series. Everything you need to know about the peculiar world, written by Miss Peregrine herself.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A tense, moving, and wondrously strange first novel. The photographs and text work together brilliantly to create an unforgettable story.”—John Green, New York Times best-selling author of Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns

“Readers searching for the next Harry Potter may want to visit Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.”—CNN

“Riggs deftly moves between fantasy and reality, prose and photography to create an enchanting and at times positively terrifying story.”—Associated Press

“I read all of the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children books and I loved them.”—Florence of Florence + The Machine

“[A] thrilling, Tim Burton-esque tale with haunting photographs.”—USA Today Pop Candy

“With its X-Men: First Class-meets-time-travel story line, David Lynchian imagery, and rich, eerie detail, it’s no wonder Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has been snapped up by Twentieth Century Fox. B+”—Entertainment Weekly

“Peculiar’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. Riggs’ chilling, wondrous novel is already headed to the movies.”—People

“You'll love it if you want a good thriller for the summer. It's a mystery, and you'll race to solve it before Jacob figures it out for himself.”—Seventeen

“Delightfully weird.”—Good Housekeeping

“One of the coolest, creepiest YA books.”—PopSugar

About the Author

Ransom Riggs is the author of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Quirk, 2011), a New York Times best seller, as well as its best-selling sequels Hollow City (Quirk, 2013) and Library of Souls (Quirk, 2015). He lives in Santa Monica, CA, with his wife.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After. Like many of the extraordinary things to come, it involved my grandfather, Abraham Portman.
Growing up, Grandpa Portman was the most fascinating person I knew. He had lived in an orphanage, fought in wars, crossed oceans by steamship and deserts on horseback, performed in circuses, knew everything about guns and self-defense and surviving in the wilderness, and spoke at least three languages that weren’t English. It all seemed unfathomably exotic to a kid who’d never left Florida, and I begged him to regale me with stories whenever I saw him. He always obliged, telling them like secrets that could be entrusted only to me.
When I was six I decided that my only chance of having a life half as exciting as Grandpa Portman’s was to become an explorer. He encouraged me by spending afternoons at my side hunched over maps of the world, plotting imaginary expeditions with trails of red pushpins and telling me about the fantastic places I would discover one day. At home I made my ambitions known by parading around with a cardboard tube held to my eye, shouting, “Land ho!” and “Prepare a landing party!” until my parents shooed me outside. I think they worried that my grandfather would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I’d never recover—that these fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions—so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.
I felt even more cheated when I realized that most of Grandpa Portman’s best stories couldn’t possibly be true. The tallest tales were always about his childhood, like how he was born in Poland but at twelve had been shipped off to a children’s home in Wales. When I would ask why he had to leave his parents, his answer was always the same: because the monsters were after him. Poland was simply rotten with them, he said.
“What kind of monsters?” I’d ask, wide-eyed. It became a sort of routine. “Awful hunched-over ones with rotting skin and black eyes,” he’d say. “And they walked like this!” And he’d shamble after me like an old-time movie monster until I ran away laughing.
Every time he described them he’d toss in some lurid new detail: they stank like putrefying trash; they were invisible except for their shadows; a pack of squirming tentacles lurked inside their mouths and could whip out in an instant and pull you into their powerful jaws. It wasn’t long before I had trouble falling asleep, my hyperactive imagination transforming the hiss of tires on wet pavement into labored breathing just outside my window or shadows under the door into twisting gray-black tentacles. I was scared of the monsters but thrilled to imagine my grandfather battling them and surviving to tell the tale.
More fantastic still were his stories about life in the Welsh children’s home. It was an enchanted place, he said, designed to keep kids safe from the monsters, on an island where the sun shined every day and nobody ever got sick or died. Everyone lived together in a big house that was protected by a wise old bird—or so the story went. As I got older, though, I began to have doubts.
“What kind of bird?” I asked him one afternoon at age seven, eyeing him skeptically across the card table where he was letting me win at Monopoly.
“A big hawk who smoked a pipe,” he said.
“You must think I’m pretty dumb, Grandpa.”
He thumbed through his dwindling stack of orange and blue money. “I would never think that about you, Yakob.” I knew I’d offended him because the Polish accent he could never quite shake had come out of hiding, so that would became vood and think became sink. Feeling guilty, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“But why did the monsters want to hurt you?” I asked.
“Because we weren’t like other people. We were peculiar.”
“Peculiar how?”
“Oh, all sorts of ways,” he said. “There was a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him, a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads.”
It was hard to tell if he was being serious. Then again, my grandfather was not known as a teller of jokes. He frowned, reading the doubt on my face.
“Fine, you don’t have to take my word for it,” he said. “I got pictures!” He pushed back his lawn chair and went into the house, leaving me alone on the screened-in lanai. A minute later he came back holding an old cigar box. I leaned in to look as he drew out four wrinkled and yellowing snapshots.
The first was a blurry picture of what looked like a suit of clothes with no person in them. Either that or the person didn’t have a head.
“Sure, he’s got a head!” my grandfather said, grinning. “Only you can’t see it.”
“Why not? Is he invisible?”
“Hey, look at the brain on this one!” He raised his eyebrows as if I’d surprised him with my powers of deduction. “Millard, his name was. Funny kid. Sometimes he’d say, ‘Hey Abe, I know what you did today,’ and he’d tell you where you’d been, what you had to eat, if you picked your nose when you thought nobody was looking. Sometimes he’d follow you, quiet as a mouse, with no clothes on so you couldn’t see him—just watching!” He shook his head. “Of all the things, eh?”
He slipped me another photo. Once I’d had a moment to look at it, he said, “So? What do you see?”
“A little girl?”
“And?”
“She’s wearing a crown.”
He tapped the bottom of the picture. “What about her feet?”
I held the snapshot closer. The girl’s feet weren’t touching the ground. But she wasn’t jumping—she seemed to be floating in the air. My jaw fell open.
“She’s flying!”
“Close,” my grandfather said. “She’s levitating. Only she couldn’t control herself too well, so sometimes we had to tie a rope around her to keep her from floating away!”
My eyes were glued to her haunting, doll-like face. “Is it real?”
“Of course it is,” he said gruffly, taking the picture and replacing it with another, this one of a scrawny boy lifting a boulder. “Victor and his sister weren’t so smart,” he said, “but boy were they strong!”
“He doesn’t look strong,” I said, studying the boy’s skinny arms.
“Trust me, he was. I tried to arm-wrestle him once and he just about tore my hand off!”
But the strangest photo was the last one. It was the back of somebody’s head, with a face painted on it.
I stared at the last photo as Grandpa Portman explained. “He had two mouths, see? One in the front and one in the back. That’s why he got so big and fat!”
“But it’s fake,” I said. “The face is just painted on.”
“Sure, the paint’s fake. It was for a circus show. But I’m telling you, he had two mouths. You don’t believe me?”
I thought about it, looking at the pictures and then at my grandfather, his face so earnest and open. What reason would he have to lie?
“I believe you,” I said.
And I really did believe him—for a few years, at least—though mostly because I wanted to, like other kids my age wanted to believe in Santa Claus. We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing them becomes too high, which for me was the day in second grade when Robbie Jensen pantsed me at lunch in front of a table of girls and announced that I believed in fairies. It was just deserts, I suppose, for repeating my grandfather’s stories at school but in those humiliating seconds I foresaw the moniker “fairy boy” trailing me for years and, rightly or not, I resented him for it.
Grandpa Portman picked me up from school that afternoon, as he often did when both my parents were working. I climbed into the passenger seat of his old Pontiac and declared that I didn’t believe in his fairy stories anymore.
“What fairy stories?” he said, peering at me over his glasses.
“You know. The stories. About the kids and the monsters.”
He seemed confused. “Who said anything about fairies?”
I told him that a made-up story and a fairy tale were the same thing, and that fairy tales were for pants-wetting babies, and that I knew his photos and stories were fakes. I expected him to get mad or put up a fight, but instead he just said, “Okay,” and threw the Pontiac into drive. With a stab of his foot on the accelerator we lurched away from the curb. And that was the end of it.
I guess he’d seen it coming—I had to grow out of them eventually—but he dropped the whole thing so quickly it left me feeling like I’d been lied to. I couldn’t understand why he’d made up all that stuff, tricked me into believing that extraordinary things were possible when they weren’t. It wasn’t until a few years later that my dad explained it to me: Grandpa had told him some of the same stories when he was a kid, and they weren’t lies, exactly, but exaggerated versions of the truth—because the story of Grandpa Portman’s childhood wasn’t a fairy tale at all. It was a horror story.
My grandfather was the only member of his family to escape Poland before the Second World War broke out. He was twelve years old when his parents sent him into the arms of strangers, putting their youngest son on a train to Britain with nothing more than a suitcase and the clothes on his back. It was a one-way ticket. He never saw his mother or father again, or his older brothers, his cousins, his aunts and uncles. Each one would be dead before his sixteenth birthday, killed by the monsters he had so narrowly escaped. But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.
Like the monsters, the enchanted-island story was also a truth in disguise. Compared to the horrors of mainland Europe, the children’s home that had taken in my grandfather must’ve seemed like a paradise, and so in his stories it had become one: a safe haven of endless summers and guardian angels and magical children, who couldn’t really fly or turn invisible or lift boulders, of course. The peculiarity for which they’d been hunted was simply their Jewishness. They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood. What made them amazing wasn’t that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chambers was miracle enough.
I stopped asking my grandfather to tell me stories, and I think secretly he was relieved. An air of mystery closed around the details of his early life. I didn’t pry. He had been through hell and had a right to his secrets. I felt ashamed for having been jealous of his life, considering the price he’d paid for it, and I tried to feel lucky for the safe and unextraordinary one that I had done nothing to deserve.
Then, a few years later, when I was fifteen, an extraordinary and terrible thing happened, and there was only Before and After.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004FGMDOQ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Quirk Books; 1st edition (June 7, 2011)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 7, 2011
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 133389 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 358 pages

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4.3 37,087 ratings

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Ransom Riggs

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Ransom Riggs was born on a farm in Maryland and grew up in Florida, but now makes his home in the land of peculiar children: Southern California, where he lives with his wife, bestselling author Tahereh Mafi. Ransom was raised on a steady diet of ghost stories and British comedy, which probably explains the novels he writes. He’s the author of the #1 bestselling Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children series, the first of which was adapted into a major motion picture from 20th Century Fox, directed by Tim Burton.

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josephine briggs

The writer has a great imagination integrating the old photographs into the story

Reviewed in the United States on May 2, 2014

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When I saw the name of the book I thought it concerned children who were mentally or emotionally troubled. Not so.

The book contains many old black and white snapshots and studio portraits of children dressed in Halloween costumes, dress clothes and clothes worn many years ago, posed in unusual poses. The writer has a great imagination integrating the old photographs into the story. It is a great book for YAs, especially boys, but would be frightening for younger children.

The book begins with Jacob Portman, going on sixteen, who feels he does not belong to his own world, south Florida's west coast. His mother is a business woman, wealthy, working in the family business, excellent in business. not much for family life. The name of the family business is Smart Aid, growing all over Florida. Jacob is being groomed for the business, he doesn't want this for his lifes work. His father is a would be ornithologist, planning a book on birds which has yet to come to fruition. Both parents are busy with their own lives and feel that because Jacob gets whatever he wants they have done a good job. Jacob has one friend, Ricky, he is not popular. But he had Grandpa Portman who told Jacob stories about the time he escaped from the Nazis when he was young and as a child was sent to an orphanage on Cairnholm, off the coast of Wales. He told Jacob about the strange people, monsters after the kids and he showed his grandson some of the photos of these kids, taken many years ago, old antique photos. Jacob grew too old for such stories, they were all silly. His parents agreed. Then one night Jacob and Ricky went to visit Grandpa. Grandpa lay dead. Jacob saw a monster lurking in the bushes. He swore he saw a monster, Ricky saw nothing. Just possible a wild animal. Jacob was in a bad state for months. His parents found a good psychiatrist. There is a letter from the orphanage Grandpa had spend so much of his childhood from the old headmistress. Could she still be alive? Jacob wants to go to Cairnholm to see where Grandpa had grown up. His psychiatrist agrees it would be good. As for his father, the island is wonderful for birding. So off to Cairnholm go father and son. Cairnholm is a strange island, rough and primitive. Frank wants to bird. Jacob wants to see the old orphanage. Is it real? Was it a figment of Grandpa's imagination? Jacob wants to know the truth. Jacob found a letter among Grandpa's letters. It was from the old orphanage Grandpa had spend much of his childhood, from the old headmistress. Could the old lady still be alive? Jacob wants to go to Cairnholm to see where Grandps had talked so much about. His psychiatrist agreed that it would be good for the boy. And as for father, the island was wonderful for birding which excited Frank Portman. So off to Cairnholm go father and son.

This is a strange island, rough, primitive not what the pair are used to. Frank wants to bird, Jacob wants to find the old orphanage that Grandpa had spoke of. Is it real or a figment of the old man's imagination. Two tough teenage boys are told to show Jacob where the old house is located. The boys take him to a bog and tell him where the house is located. The pair, good friends, refuse to accompany him the rest of the way. Why?

Jocob soldiered on. This is an old ruined house, falling apart, decrepid, old, back in time, falling apart. Everything in the house is falling apart, not worth keeping. Then Jacob goes through a time loop, ends back in time. The house is beautiful, clean, the food is good. Miss Peregrine, the name of a bird of prey, is a good housemother, good for the orphans. She keeps them in check, she loves them. Jacob is impressed. The time stops. It is always September 3, 1940. There is a small village close to the orphanage. The villagers do the same thing every day. The orphans are ordinary kids to a point. They are different than ordinary kids. They really are peculiar as Jacob finds out. Stuck in a time loop these kids are in their eighties. Thise book is quite an adventure for young boys. The author writes well and has a wonderful imagination.

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Shannon W.

Impressive Beginning

Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2014

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I will admit, I was worried about this book. I'd read a lot of very unflattering reviews over the months since I purchased it. I think that's why it took me more than a year before I actually decided to sit down and read it. I began the book not expecting much and I will admit, I was pleasantly surprised by the story that unfolded. It was better than many typical novels advertised as both YA and for a wider adult audience. I think that many adults would be very satisfied with the series that Ransom Riggs has started. I'm looking forward to future outings with Miss Peregrine and her Peculiar Children.

We are introduced to Jacob Portman. The story is told in a first person point of view in Jacob's voice. As a young child, he forms a very special bond with his grandfather. He wants to be an explorer and adventurer just like him. He relishes in the tales that his grandfather spins for him, complete with pictures of levitating girls, invisible boys and other oddities. All too soon he begins to grow up and starts listening to the logic of his father who insists that his grandfather is just spinning imaginative, but impossible stories just to keep Jacob entertained. Jacob comes to see the pictures and fantastical tales in a new light. The tales become impossible fantasies and the photographs are now seen as fake.

Jacob is now 16 and reeling from the sudden death of his grandfather. He receives a letter that sets the fantastic events in motion. He travels to the remote Welsh island where his grandfather lived when he was a child to escape the monsters. His father travels with him so that he can observe the birds and with the blessing of Jacob's psychiatrist, he lets him explore and try to find the answers that he needs to put his mind at peace. Jacob finds the home where his grandfather lived with all of those peculiar children. Children who should be dead and gone according to the island residents, but are there! And they are alive and well! The story takes on a more fantastical turn that I had expected but this wasn't unwelcome at all. The descriptions and the story are so well done that you can set aside your notions of what's possible and make yourself believe that this can happen.

The photographs used within the novel are incredible. There have been many reviewers that have stated that the pictures seem to serve no purpose and that they don't correspond to what's being described in the book. I have to strongly disagree with this statement. I thought the pictures did a great job of giving a visual to the events in the story. They put a real face to the characters in the story. It makes you wonder if Ransom Riggs came upon some of these pictures and decided to tell their story. My only complaint about the pictures and other visual items in the book would be that they are rather difficult for Kindle (and possibly other e-book) users. There is a workaround, but not everyone would be willing or able to do it. If I didn't think the detail was good enough on my Kindle, I opened my Kindle App for PC and I could then see everything.

For me, this was a very well written novel. The characters were engaging, very well fleshed out and left you wanting to get to know them even better. There was a supernatural aspect to the book that wasn't overdone or overblown, it was made believable and above all, interesting. The pace was good, there were very few places that I would say that the story lagged or slowed down. The level of detail was impressive without going on and on and on about little things that didn't matter. The mysteries are well explained and the suspense keeps you on the edge of your seat till the very end.

The ending was very well done. It left room for a sequel without feeling unfinished. Sure, there's a bit of a cliffhanger, but it's not one of those soap-opera cliffhangers where you're more angry than excited for the next step. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants to escape into another time and place for at least a little while. Put aside your conceptions of what is real and what is possible and just enjoy the ride. Due to some violence and some mature language and imagery, I would not recommend this to readers under the age of 13-14...just my personal impression.

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Diego

Muito bom o livro

Reviewed in Brazil on November 3, 2022

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Leitura boa as páginas não são brancas.

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BLACK PERSEO

Wow

Reviewed in Mexico on February 12, 2020

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Libro en pasta blanda en inglés. Un historia de fantasía y aventura muy entretenida y envolvente. Con un final algo abrupto que insitan al lector a continuar con el siguiente volumen. Una presentación muy llamativa con fotografías entre el texto haciendo alucion a la narración, haciendo aún más fácil adentrarse a su mundo. Muy recomendable

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Ekaterina

Buono.

Reviewed in Italy on May 3, 2019

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Questo primo racconto mi è piaciuto abbastanza. Sconsiglio i confronti con il film - come spesso accade, il libro è molto più interessante.

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9Cows

SPOILER ALERT

Reviewed in India on October 17, 2017

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This is perhaps the best of the trilogy. The book really keeps you hooked once you pick it up. The writing style is interesting if not incredible. The story build up is exciting and you do want to go through the pages. This book alone is 5 STAR+.

SPOILER ALERT:
If this was a stand alone book, this would have been a fantastic read and don't get me wrong, this is. Though considering this is a trilogy, it is really sad that the gripping narration and fast paced story line of this book is not carried to the other two. The timing for introducing suspense and excitement is bang on in this one, in the other two it is a very long drag!

The second book is the worst of all. It becomes tiring after the first 5th of the book. You feel and realize that this book is more of a filler - a page filler, to make a trilogy out of it. The book loses it's excitement, due to the predictable "surprise elements" and just drags on and on. Too much drama, romance and ill fitting thriller sections - for no reason at all. Took me over a week to finish it. It felt like a very boring assignment that you have to finish so you can move on to the next, hoping it to be better.

The third book gets better, than the second - but it is very easy to get better than the second, so it doesn't say much about the third book either. The writing style that was so encapsulating in the first book comes back here in bits and pieces, but this book is nowhere close to the first. Full of boring and unnecessary passages.

Overall, I feel, that this trilogy could have been ended at least 2 books earlier; and I believe this could have been one to keep forever and pass it on for generations, but, the NEED for a TRILOGY has definitely overtaken the the requirement for good material. Alas! The writer has talent, this could have been so much better.

17 people found this helpful

Billi Baloo

Unexpected surprise

Reviewed in Germany on July 31, 2018

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I bought this book because I went to Wales for a holiday and I had been looking for mysteries set in Wales. For quite a while now I don’t take “real” books but my kindle loaded with all kind of e-books. But when I saw the pictures in the sample I decided to buy the paperback.

It was the perfect decision as you need to be able to see the pictures properly. They are very important for the story and it would be a shame to miss some tiny details.

As mentioned above I’d expected some kind of whodunit set in Wales and was a bit irritated that the book started in the US. (Obviously I haven’t read the summary thoroughly enough.) Furthermore it soon became clear that the book is not a whodunit but YA fantasy. Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE YA fantasy! I just didn’t expect it.

Once I had realized what I was reading I loved the book. I love the way Riggs created a story around hundreds of ancient pictures he’s bought. And I love the story itself. Though I still wonder why he chose a Welsh island instead of some far-away-place in the US it soon made no difference as the world created in the book could be everywhere.

The characters are all very interesting and full of surprise. The story is brilliant and has some unexpected twists which is always nice as it’s boring when you know the ending after a third of the book.

I am very much looking forward to read the sequel and recommend this book to all who love good fiction!

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