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

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

Minli is a cheerful and warm-hearted girl, despite the life of poverty that she and her parents lead in their small village in China.  However, her mother’s dissatisfaction with their difficult life and her father’s stories inspire Minli to search for the Old Man in the Moon.  She hopes he will tell her how she can improve her family’s fortune.  On her journey, Minli meets a dragon who cannot fly, a poor boy whose only companion is an ox, a king, and a family who knows the secret to happiness.  Many of these characters share Chinese folktales that the author has rewritten for this book and skillfully woven in with the events of Minli’s journey.

Visit Grace Lin's web site for more information about the book, including a book trailer.