The dour child dressed like a vaudeville tap dancer does not belong in the muddy woods.
In her tiara and satin flapper dress, she frowns at you accusingly before a scabby-looking canvas backdrop. Just about the only consolation for this displeased moppet is that her shiny Mary Janes do not actually have to touch the scattered dead leaves and packed dirt beneath her feet.
She is, of course, merely a figure in an amateurishly faked photograph.
Or maybe she is Olive, a girl who can levitate.
I am no stranger to strange photographs. I worked in the photo archive of the American Museum of Natural History, and we had some three million negatives in our care - a century's worth of fake animals and dead animals and live monkeys and people who had intentionally stretched the labret piercings in their lower lips to the point that they could insert saucer-sized discs into them.
I had pictures of New York anthropologists dressing up like Chilkat shamans in order to demonstrate a ceremony witnessed in a dark longhouse three thousand miles away. I had pictures of reindeer herders who had no friggin idea what that Russian researcher was doing to them as she asked them to stand still and stare at her box on sticks.
The vintage photographs that illustrate Miss Peregrine's School for Peculiar Children perfectly amplify the strangeness of this story, not merely because they are strange to look at, but because they prompt so many questions. Strange on their face, stranger still when one conjectures the motives and circumstances of their creation. Their truth is established, challenged, and then inverted again, mirroring the journey of Riggs's hero, sixteen-year-old Jacob, as he struggles to reconcile the facts of the ordinary world with mounting evidence of something not ordinary at all.
Of course, we see this all the time in young adult literature. Heck, even Bella Swan spent some time with her mouth hanging open before she came to accept that all the hot guys in town were saps supernatural. It's going to be hard for me to explain what is so good about this novel without giving away the wholly satisfactory surprises of its plot. So we're going a little bit... afield.
Here you go: here is an odd picture. Not one of Miss Peregrine's - this is one of my old friends.
After a certain amount of squinting and examination, one might guess what's going on here - this is the skin of an African elephant being stretched and cleaned. Provided with knowledge of the photo's source, one might then guess that this skin is due to become part of a famous taxidermy display in the museum's Hall of African Mammals.
The wonderful thing that Ransom Riggs does in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is to first make us feel the pathos and violence underlying the real-world story of the photograph - in this case, the bull elephant flushed from cover by beaters, wounded and then shot dead by a wealthy American industrialist, and why? so as to populate an eerily precise yet entirely untruthful facsimile of his home in a marble hall across the ocean.
The truth of Jacob's life in Florida starts out weird and disconnected and punctuated by horror - like my poor elephant's.
But then Riggs opens up a door, for Jacob and for us, through which we are permitted to wonder: What if that's not what it is?
If we adjust our focus, forget our prejudice for the known, this photo may become an image of a living animal, the storied Planar Elephant of the Ngorongoro lowlands, loxodonta lenta. Captured as an infant by a linguist from Columbia University who shipped him back to New York folded up in a crate marked "FEATHER CAPES: KEEP VENTILATED," the shy yet friendly beast, nicknamed "Flat Pach" by his human companions - the group of students who became the famous Cracker Squad of codebreakers - became an invaluable covert operator during the early years of World War II.
Able to shimmy under doorways or wrap himself tightly to the roof of any transport, he could move with incredible stealth and perpetrate acts of sabotage with no need for tools or explosives - his immense strength was sufficient to weaken a bridge or destroy a gun emplacement. He was difficult to capture, and, once captured, impossible to detain - the ideal spy.
Flat Pach died a tragic, gruesome death in May of 1944, in a last-ditch effort to stop a crucial Nazi convoy. After multiple failed ambush attempts by the Cracker Squad, Flat Pach staked out a tunnel through which the trucks were to travel. Stretching himself across the tunnel mouth, his tough grey hide created the illusion of solid rock in the headlights of the lead truck. The driver braked wildly, causing a massive collision as the rest of the convoy plowed into him. Imagine that driver's confusion when, in the moment that fifty tons of Mercedes-Benz smashed the cab of his truck into and through the "rock face" blocking the tunnel entrance, he saw that rock face looking back at him with one soulful brown eye.
Now, needless to say, I don't do this nearly so well as does Ransom Riggs. But I don't feel too badly - Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children has already spent time on the NYT Bestseller List and the film rights provoked an intense bidding war. So if this review is a little weird and off-balance, I don't think it's going to hurt the book any.
I think it's kind of a classic. I think Jacob's deep hurt, deep disconnect, marvelous adventure, and difficult choices will cause certain questing kids to pull it close to their heart.
I also think it is so far from patronizing of its 'peculiar' characters that kids with their own physical, developmental, or emotional differences may find a home with Miss Peregrine - and that Jacob's thought processes as he chooses his path may resonate some sympathetic strings in their own minds.
As for the rest of us, just think of it as X-Men: First Class with half the submarines, far fewer instances of gratuitous lingerie, and absolutely no sectional couches. Who knew that Sebastian Shaw had the interior design taste of a Bond villain?
And this is a story for another day.
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