Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Ransom Riggs' novel Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children was a fast paced, fascinating read. The "found photos" interspersed within the chapters were awesome. It really added a deeper level to the story and made it so I was able to visualize everything much more clearly in my mind. The monsters are truly scary, and the children truly extraordinary.

From the first page I was completely entranced by the story and characters, and since the ending set up quite nicely for many sequels, I'm looking forward to any subsequent books. I also feel that since it is one week before Halloween, it is the perfect book if you're looking for a spooky pick!



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Lost in Time by Melissa de la Cruz

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I first got hooked into the Blue Bloods series my junior year of high school. Vampires had just started to become a craze, and I thought Melissa de la Cruz's take on them was very original. However, now six books and one novella in, I've just been reading them for the sake of finishing the series.

There were times throughout this book when I was so annoyed with the main protagonist (Schuyler Van Alen) that I began longing for the chapters featuring the ever sarcastic Fallen angel Mimi Force. While overall I did enjoy the book, to me it was just "okay". Two of the biggest positives to this series is the humor and the interesting twist on mythology. The biggest negative would be that even for a shorter book, it still seemed to be about 100 pages too long for the limited amount of events.

Though this review seems a bit harsh, I am looking forward to the final installment in the Blue Bloods series.




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Short but sweet

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Everyone needs to read this book. It was perfect and can be finished in one sitting. I cried.



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Following Christopher Creed by Carol Plum-Ucci

As a huge fan of the book The Body of Christopher Creed (pub. 2000), I felt a mixture of excitement and trepidation when I first learned of a sequel being published. Ever since reading it, the first book has stuck with me and remains one of my absolute favorites.

Now, published over a decade later, Following Christopher Creed picks off five years after the events in the first novel. Ever since young Christopher Creed ran away from home, the small town of Steepleton has been wrought with despair. Cancer and car accident rates are at an all-time high, more kids are turning down the path of drugs, and Christopher's family have yet to recover their loss.

College journalism student Mike Mavic has been obsessed with the Christopher Creed case ever since Chris's classmate Torey Adams launched a website chronicling his experiences with the mystery surrounding Chris's disappearance. After a dead body is uncovered in Steepleton, Mike, along with his girlfriend RayAnn, sells his laptop and travels there, in an attempt to get the story of a lifetime. Is this the body of Christopher Creed? Or is it yet another victim of Steepleton?

I'll admit, this novel was hard to get into at first. Because of its content, it was a bit of a slow burner. Lots of information, not a lot of action. Halfway through it definitely started to pick up the pace, but I still wasn't completely sold. Here was this great potential for a sequel to a book that is much loved, and I felt the author was wasting it with a bunch of pointless exposition. Then came the ending, which completely blew me away and caused me to completely reevaluate the entire novel.

Though it does work as a stand-alone, I'd recommend this book to all lovers of The Body of Christopher Creed and urge anyone who picks this up, but is struggling to get through it, to finish. The ending will not disappoint, and it made me want to do an immediate reread! Since I have seen many posts online that list Following Christopher Creed as the Steepleton Chronicles #2, here's to hoping Carol Plum-Ucci has number three in the works. There are many characters whose stories have yet to get closure, and I'd love to read about them for many books to come.

-Sam