Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

I first heard about Ransom Riggs when award-winning author and vlogger John Green shared a video Riggs had posted about his photograph collection. It appears that these photographs played some role in inspiring Riggs to write this book for young adults*.

Jacob is a teenager who was fascinated by photographs of extraordinary children his grandfather showed him when he was young. As Jacob gets older, he dismisses the stories surrounding these photographs as mere fantasy and accepts his ordinary life as the way things really are.

When his grandfather is killed in the woods behind his house, Jacob thinks he sees one of the tentacled monsters that were the villains of those stories. Ensuing nightmares lead to visits to a psychiatrist and a diagnosis of acute stress disorder. To resolve Jacob’s continuing questions, he talks his parents into letting him visit Cairnholm Island, the setting of his grandfather’s stories of peculiar children threatened by monsters.

Readers will get drawn into Jacob’s journey to seek the truth. What he finds is an intriguing and dangerous world with some very peculiar children indeed. Their meeting will cause irreversible changes to the worlds of both Jacob and the children.

• Book trailer 
• Information and the first three chapters

 *Disturbing violence and some profanity

So You Want to be a Wizard by Diane Duane

Nita is being chased by bullies when she takes refuge in the public library.  Waiting for the bullies to leave, she runs across a book she’s never seen before: So You Want to be a Wizard.  Reading it, she isn’t sure whether it’s an elaborate joke or a true invitation to learn powers that could help her protect herself, talk to trees, and help Life in all its forms.  Once she gives the “Wizard’s Oath,” tries the suggested beginning exercises, and meets another beginning wizard Kit, she finds herself on an adventure that shows that wizardry is very much alive in the world.  And she’ll need it to rescue something precious that’s been hidden by a force of death, darkness and evil often called the Lone Power.  This is just the first book in a series of magic and adventure that will take readers to the depths of the ocean and the vastness of the universe.

Personal notes: The most recent book in the Young Wizards series, A Wizard of Mars, just came out this summer.  After reading it, I just had a hankering to reread the first book.