Nan Hanway

Write and Amateur Assassin

Miss Peregrine's Home for Fantastic Stories

Nancy Scott HanwayComment

I'm reading Ransome Riggs' Miss Peregrine series, finally. (The first book has been on my list for years.)  I usually experience a terrible sense of loss when I finish one--but it's unusual to fall in love with first page.

What makes this beginning so good? In the prologue, we're taken into this new world through a grandfather's crazy stories, in which the narrator, Jacob, only half believes. In Chapter One, the novel jumps forward in time, and the now sixteen-year-old Jacob realizes that one of those stories may have murdered his grandpa. It's endlessly inventive and very peculiar. And has fantastic photos.