About Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, and the creeping sense of foreboding it left me with

*IF YOU PLAN ON READING THE BOOK, SUSPEND BELIEF AND DO NOT STOP SUSPENDING BELIEF. DO NOT QUESTION ANYTHING ABOUT THE BOOK.

Last night I read a book - Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, the debut novel by Ransom Riggs.

Basically, the book is about a boy in modern times, whose grandfather tells him fantastically unbelievable stories about children who can fly and can turn invisible, etc. What happens next is that his grandfather is killed brutally, by some strange creatures (the official report is wild animals) and then the boy goes on a trip across the Atlantic Ocean to find the truth, or closure, or whatever.

It's a good book, very nice. The atmosphere kind of wraps around you, and you keep flipping the pages. Of course, the pictures helped with that effect. I enjoyed it quite a lot.

Then again there are certain things that tick me off. Those things about the book irritate me. It makes me angry because it's not explained, and it keeps niggling away at me.

SPOILER ALERT

Two things: the ending, and the entire 'loop' theory.

No wait, three. The adult-children bother me too.

The peculiar children live in a loop started by Miss Peregrine, repeating the day of September third over and over again. For about eighty years, apparently?

One thing that bothers me is that the loop apparently stretches across the entire world or something. It's not limited to a particular physical landscape. It doesn't have a fixed entry point. (The protagonist - I forgot his name, but that's not very important - enters through the cairn every time, I think, but apparently the wights in the submarine, at the end, entered through another point? What the fuck?)

That's not okay. It's like the author made up a half-assed fantasy world, and then drew vivid characters. It's a but like... Drawing incredibly detailed flowers, and then splashing some blue and green around for the sky and grass.

Maybe it's supposed to add to the atmosphere, but not for me. It made my experience very frustrating. It's like a camera that refuse to focus no matter what you do to it.

Another point that bothers me is the ending. The protagonist gives up his time with little to no angst at all. From what I see, he's just "oh... There's nothing much for me here... And the peculiars need me... Okay!"

That's not okay. That is very not okay. I don't care how hardened and disillusioned and cynical you are, no one gives up everything that they've ever known just for a motley bunch of strange adult-kids that they've known for three months max.

You might have a hero complex or whatever, but you'll still feel a certain amount of angst about leaving your entire universe with next to no hope of going back.

The protagonist here seems to make a difficult decision and then promptly forget all about it. I don't know why. Maybe it's to prove a point. Maybe to subtly emphasize a subtle point. Whatever, his non-reaction pisses me off.

Also the loop-hopping thing? Ridiculous. I don't claim to know about temporal whatever, but it seems to me that the author's mixing linear and non-linear timelines without explaining how they work or interact.

I imagine that if you could choose when to step out of a loop, then the protagonist could just have stepped out a few hours after he went in, sparing himself the where-were-you lecture. Hell, if you could CHOOSE when to step out, then you could spent a few centuries inside and step out BEFORE the time when you went in. There seems to be no effect at all. You don't de-age.

Ohhhh, holy shit, wait a second. That is a CHEAT. That is a CHEAT CODE, that is a NASTY LITTLE CHEAT. If the protagonist steps into the loop, and then spends a few centuries in it, then he could presumably step back into his own time. Same age, same time, a few centuries of experience.

Think of it this way: a straight line, which is our time. And a bubble attached to September third. From present time, hook a line into that bubble.

This implies that you can hook a line from anywhere into that bubble. That means that any time between the start of the bubble and modern time is FREE GAME. That's, I don't know... You could go into the bubble at 2005, and come out into 1990 to visit your deceased dad. Or something.

In my limited view, that bubble is a phenomenal CHEAT and should not exist. It's a cheat for everyone who didn't join the bubble at the start.

And the author doesn't even try to placate our anxiety. He's like, "whatever, let's go on with the plot, the laws of this universe doesn't matter, I'll tell you more when I've figured out how to twist it to fit the plot".

Um.

I'm actually plotting this out as I write. Any epiphanies I get is real-time. Thus might not be very coherent. Timelines are confusing. My head hurts. Please tell me if I've gotten anything wrong.

Okay, last thing that bothers me: the adult-children. As I was reading the book, I felt that there was something very wrong with something. I couldn't figure it out, it was like background noise. Annoying background noise.

The realisation came when I read the part about them burying Victor, at the very end.

They (the adult-children, the peculiars) had issues that would warrant immediate hospitalisation and months and years of therapy. They seem fine.

They've been stuck in the loop for eighty years. That would drive me stir-crazy, I'd commit suicide. They seem fine.

They mutilate animals and keep corpses in rooms and torment the townspeople and

ESSENTIALLY, they have normalised extremely abnormal behaviour. That is not good. That is not okay. Miss Peregrine seems nice and strict and like a normal schoolteacher. SHE IS NOT OKAY. I cannot emphasize this enough - SHE started the loop, kept them unchanging, fed them morbid news from the future, treated their abnormalities as normal (though really there isn't another way to treat it, in this situation), turned a blind eye to most of their increasingly sadistic and fucked-up past times...

Maybe that was the only thing to do, though. She couldn't treat them as freaks and expect them to coexist for eighty years. She couldn't expect them to accept eighty years without entertainment. No one expects children to be nice when their victims will forget everything the next day.

But this actually brings up another point that I forgot - what about the townspeople? They're not in the loop, since they remember nothing. They're like memories that are blown to sand the moment the loop resets. Was it really necessary to include them in the loop? How far does the loop extend, anyway? If you went to china, while in the loop, would you see the same thing? Memories repeating? How do loops every coexist? Does every loop include all the loops that have been created before it or what?

This is making me a little angry. It all feels a little half-assed and half-assed books make me want to rip it up because it's a waste of paper. At least shitty fanfiction is free and digital.

What I imagine is that they've finished a few drafts of the book, and someone goes "okay that's it, there's only the loop explanation left. Add that in somewhere and it'll be read to print", and then someone else says "okay" and prints it anyway because who listens to editors anyway?

This book left me with a feeling that the sky had just permanently turned purple. And that it's always been purple. And that you're the only delusional one who thinks that it should be blue.

Let me say this again: it's a good book. I enjoyed it.

It just left me with a subtly uncomfortable feeling that developed into full-fledged panic when I realised that it was wrong! everything was wrong! this is wrong wrong wrong wrong OH MY FUCKING GOD I FEEL NAUSEOUS.

This book should come with a warning: if you have a vivid imagination and think too much, you will feel uncomfortable and highly creeped out, and if you read it at night, and then start logically THINKING about the book, you will have a hard time falling asleep.

Moral of the post: read the book, enjoy it, FOR FUCK'S SAKE DON'T ANALYSE IT.

/EDIT/: the word is "bizarre".