4 Stars
This is the third book in the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series. Definitely start with the first two books, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and Hollow City before even thinking about picking up Library of Souls. You can’t read this book as a stand alone novel. And I highly recommend that you read all three. While highly enjoyable, I couldn’t rate this as a 5 star book no matter how much I liked the series, there were just some things that didn’t sit well with me.
Library of Souls picks up almost exactly where Hollow City leaves off. You are once again with Jacob Portman and Emma Bloom, peculiar children on a mission to save their friends and all of pecuilardom from not only the monsters who have been preying on them, but on the person who has been behind all of these evil machinations. Along with Addison, a dog with a nose for sniffing out peculiar children, they will travel from the present day to the Victorian era slums of Devil’s Acre to save their friends and their very existence.
Once again, the story is engrossing and there is action at every turn. You think you know who your friends and who your enemies are only to have the tables turned on you more than once. Jacob and Emma rely on themselves more often than not and you watch as Jacob comes into his own peculiar abilities as well as growing in confidence throughout the journey. The story is also told around old photographs and without the photographs, I don’t think any of the books in the series would have quite the same impact.
There were a few things that just didn’t jive for me this time around. The start of the story seemed to take quite awhile to get itself established again and this was surprising considering that it picked up right where the previous novel left off. It seemed to take a very long time to get to the climax and there were several beginnings of stories and backstories that were never fleshed out and explained and this hurt the story in ways because as the climax came closer, they became more important but since they weren’t well explained, it led to some confusion. And the ending…no. The ending actually took away from the story. While it did make me happy on some levels, it was so abrupt and left so many questions, I just couldn’t like how it ended.
Maybe that means that the peculiar children aren’t quite done yet?
I know that this series gets tagged a lot as a YA novel, but I definitely don’t think that it is purely for the YA audience. There are definitely adult themes and some of the action is quite graphic and would not really be appropriate for many young readers. But I definitely recommend it to anyone who likes a good story, interesting characters and a little bit of fantasy in their lives.
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