Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs
As the story opens, sixteen-year-old Jacob discovers a powerful new ability, and soon he’s diving through history to rescue his peculiar companions from a heavily guarded fortress. Accompanying Jacob on his journey are Emma Bloom, a girl with fire at her fingertips, and Addison MacHenry, a dog with a nose for sniffing out lost children.
They’ll travel from modern-day London to the labyrinthine alleys of Devil’s Acre, the most wretched slum in all of Victorian England. It’s a place where the fate of peculiar children everywhere will be decided once and for all.
As I mentioned in my review of Hollow City, I recently went to see the Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children movie. While I did like it at the time, finishing Library of Souls has further convinced me that the ending they gave to the movie was just plain silly. With so much amazing material in Library of Souls, we as the fans deserved much better.
As in Hollow City, the plot picks up immediately after the end of the previous book and immediately plunges us back into the story. Library of Souls was just fabulous. It had all the magic of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children while broadlibrary of souls ransom riggsening the world-building and introducing quite a few new twists to the story. If you stopped reading after the first book in the series, do yourself a favor and pick up Hollow City and Library of Souls. This is one series worth finishing out as its one of the most imaginative and engrossing of any I’ve read in recent years. I’m not even hinting at any spoilers because I think you should just go read it and not take my word for it!
