LIBRARY OF SOULS | Ransom Riggs
Kindle edition | Young Adult | Fantasy | 465 pages
Released 22 September 2015
The adventures that began with Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and continued with Hollow City comes to a thrilling conclusion with Library of Souls.
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.
Like its predecessors, Library of Souls blends thrilling fantasy with never-before-published vintage photography. – GOODREADS
The movie of book 1 was released in September 2016.
It’s now available to own on BluRay, DVD, 3D, 4K.
Grab yourself a copy by clicking here.
Jacob has been finding his ‘peculiar’ way, and Library of Souls is where he needs to step up, take charge, and save peculiardom. For Jacob, it’s more than a battle between good and bad, it’s a battle between an old life and a new one. Challenge after challenge helps him learn about his own strengths, his new peculiar world, and for his confidence to build to new levels.
Once again, the vintage photos that inspired the story are scattered throughout the book. They are an integral part of the experience and a wonderful tool in helping readers visualize the settings, the people, and the quirks. Riggs’ imagination is incredible and it’s such a gift that he found an original way to share the inspirations behind the series as part of the books.
For those of you who haven’t read Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (1) and Hollow City (2) I suggest you start at the beginning. You’ll need to know the full story to fully appreciate the different layers of the plot in book 3.
To help you out in the meantime, here’s a brief outline of the main concepts and character types as listed in the front of the book. I don’t believe this information would be classed as a spoiler. It’s more of a reference tool for budding peculiars 🙂
- PECULIARS | The hidden branch of any species, human or animal, that is blessed—and cursed—with supernormal traits. Respected in ancient times, feared and persecuted more recently, peculiars are outcasts who live in the shadows.
- LOOP | A limited area in which a single day is repeated endlessly. Created and maintained by ymbrynes to shelter their peculiar wards from danger, loops delay indefinitely the aging of their inhabitants. But loop dwellers are by no means immortal: each day they “skip” is a debt that’s banked away, to be repaid in gruesome rapid aging should they linger too long outside their loop.
- YMBRYNES | The shape-shifting matriarchs of peculiardom. They can change into birds at will, manipulate time, and are charged with the protection of peculiar children. In the Old Peculiar language, the word ymbryne (pronounced imm-brinn) means “revolution” or “circuit.”
- HOLLOWGAST | Monstrous ex-peculiars who hunger for the souls of their former brethren. Corpselike and withered except for their muscular jaws, within which they harbor powerful, tentacle-like tongues. Especially dangerous because they’re invisible to all but a few peculiars, of whom Jacob Portman is the only one known alive. (His late grandfather was another.) Until a recent innovation enhanced their abilities, hollows could not enter loops, which is why loops have been the preferred home of peculiars.
- WIGHTS A hollowgast that consumes enough peculiar souls becomes a wight, which are visible to all and resemble normals in every way but one: their pupil-less, perfectly white eyes. Brilliant, manipulative, and skilled at blending in, wights have spent years infiltrating both normal and peculiar society. They could be anyone: your grocer, your bus driver, your psychiatrist. They’ve waged a long campaign of murder, fear, and kidnapping against peculiars, using hollowgast as their monstrous assassins. Their ultimate goal is to exact revenge upon, and take control of, peculiardom.
The book is quite long (over 460 pages) and the plot moves through many varied settings and challenges. Action crops up frequently, the characters have great depth, and the complexities of time-travel and loops are backed-up with a logical and conceivable explanation. The end of this series was quite satisfying. I felt that story lines were resolved well, all my questions were answered, and readers were given a comforting glimpse of how the characters would fare in their future.
My favorite quote:
Sometimes it seemed like Emma had whole conversations with me inside her head—ones I wasn’t privy to—and then she’d get frustrated that I was confused when she finally let me in on them.
The final book in the Miss Peregrine series didn’t disappoint and is filled with the same magic, action, and quirkiness I enjoyed in books 1 and 2. It’s another of those times when I have to accept that the series is over. Recommended for fans of original fantasy, quirk, and vivid settings.
PS – a fun fact I found out today – Ransom Riggs is writing a new peculiar trilogy set in America. YAY!
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