Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs)

Book, blanket and cat - lovely :)

This book I bought on a whim. I had to order some new books from amazon. Or reorder, really, since some book loans sometimes extend themselves into gift giving, and I like to have a small library at work to share with my students. As I was finishing up my order of well loved familiar books, I saw this one advertized. It looked interesting enough, both the levitating girl on the cover, and the description:

A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of very curious photographs. Fiction is based on real black and white photographs.
 

The plot is catchy. It had me in its thrall immediately, but what can you expect when it is about a troubled teen finding himself struggling with monsters and impossible peculiarities, I love that kind of stories! I also love the photographs, although these are perhaps also the major drawback of the book. They come from museum collections, and Riggs has looked through them finding the strangest ones. Sometimes, though, it just feels like he writes parts of his story to make an image fit in. In these instances the story feels strangely constructed and fake. I liked the rest of the book, and the actual photos, enough to be able to forgive this, though. I particularly liked the ending, and this is not very like me. I am a sucker for the beginning of fantasy books, I love being allowed to get to know a new fictional universe. I often enjoy exploring the setting more than I enjoy the actual plot. This time, though, both are equally captivating.


As you can probably tell from the image, my book is a large print edition. This makes it an easy read. The language isn't too complicated either, and this book should suit most young adults, given that they enjoy non-realistic fiction. There is however *possible spoiler alert (white letters - mark the text to read it)* some time travel logic that needs to be followed, and that can, as you may know, be slightly complicated. I enjoyed this book very much, and wholehearedly recommend it!

A song of Ice and Fire (George R. R. Martin)

You may have picked up that HBO is making a vastly popular tv series that is called Game of Thrones. It has beautiful princesses, smart dwarfs, pure evil, sweet children, and nasty ones, dragons, knights, magical swords, love, war, and oh, yes, sex, and is based on George R. R. Martin's now 5 books long series A song of Ice and Fire.

This is however not my first meeting with Martin's vast fantasy world of Westeros (and the lands beyond the sea). My first meeting with it was years and years ago, playing the boardgame (which I found horribly boring, as I don't particularly enjoy strategizing), and hearing some of the other players talk about the books. Finally, maybe about a year or two ago, I got to know them as well. As audiobooks. And I fell in love. They are every bit as fantastic as everybody said back then. I don't even know where to start to give you an idea of what they are about. There are so many characters, and so many storylines. The books do however follow some of the powerful families of the Iron Kingdoms. We learn the stories and ambitions of some of their members, we follow their strategies in their struggle for what they want, be it love, power, wealth, or justice.

To cover all of this (so far published) material, poor Roy Dotrice has had to read 201,5 hours for the audiobooks. And still there is more to come. Apparently, Martin planned for there to be fewer books, but then there was so much that needed to be told. According to wikipedia he is writing two more.

If you are at all interested in fantasy literature, let me just say: do yourself a favor and read (or listen to) these books if you haven't already.

This time I am treating you to the trailer for the tv series rather than a picture :)