"Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children" by Ransom Riggs

This is an odd little book.  For years, I had it in a library for 6th to 12th graders, and just assumed from the cover and the little print that it was for High School.  It also showed up on the NY Times Bestseller list.  Not for kids.  But then, my Middle School students were checking it out ... a lot!  So, when I couldn't sleep one night recently, I finally started to read it.  On one hand, it's not nearly as creepy as I thought, on the other hand, it does have an element of freaky and a dash of horror, although I found the horror elements to be light (and I'm a total baby, so if I wasn't too scared, it can't be that bad).  It's kind of like "Harry Potter meets a teen version of a horror story".  Don't want to give too much of the plot away, but it is an interesting spin.  Ransom Riggs is a filmmaker, not necessarily a writer for youth.  He is fascinated with the visual image, and collected/found a large number of older photographs, many from the turn of the last century -- a time when photography was new and mysticism was extremely popular.  Mix a strong belief in the supernatural with the curiousity of budding photographers and you get a lot of pictures which are clearly manipulated, and only slightly odd.  Riggs took these photos and wove them into a narrative, doing some pretty impressive world-building along the way.  Yes, there are criticisms.  The lead character reads young.  Some of the editing is sloppy (at one point there are kids hiding under some stairs yet climbing that the same time) and an argument can be made that the narrative is stretched to wrap around the photos -- some of the photos he tries to pull together for a lead character don't actually look like the same person.  Overall, however, I was willing to forgive these minor transgressions for a tale which is whimsical, and, while drawing on some classic archetypes, is creative and fresh.  I couldn't predict where it was going to go, and I always like that.  Bottom line is that it was enjoyable, page-turning, and not what I expected.  Which is always a good thing.  (PS Coming to a Theatre Near You -- and likely to be much scarier in a darkened room)