Library of Souls (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children Series, 3)
Ransom Riggs, 2016
Quirk Publishing
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594747588
Summary
The adventure that began with Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and continued in 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 to create a one-of-a-kind reading experience. (From the publisher.)
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2011) is the first book in the Peculiar Children Series. Hollow City (2014) is the second, and this book, Library of Souls (2016), is the third.
Tim Burton's film adaption of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children was released in 2016. It stars Eva Green and Asa Butterfield.
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Englewood, Florida, USA
• Education—B.A., Kenyon College; M.A., University of Southern California
• Currently—lives in Santa Monica, California
In his words:
Hi, I'm Ransom, and I like to tell stories. Sometimes I tell them with words, sometimes with pictures, often with both.
I grew up on a farm on the Eastern shore of Maryland and also in a little house by the beach in Englewood, Florida where I got very tan and swam every day until I became half fish. I started writing stories when I was young, on an old typewriter that jammed and longhand on legal pads.
When I was a little older I got a camera for Christmas and became obsessed with photography, and when I was a little older still my friends and I came into possession of a half-broken video camera and began to make our own movies, starring ourselves, using our bedrooms and backyards for sets.
I have loved writing stories and taking photographs and making movies ever since, and have endeavored to do all three.
Education and early career
After high school I went to Kenyon College, a very pretty and quite old by American standards college in rural Ohio, where I studied literature and got a degree in English. Then I fulfilled a long-held dream and went to film school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
I'd been making films since the backyard-masterpiece days of my childhood, but at USC I learned how to make them bigger and better and shiny-looking. I graduated with what I thought was a pretty slick thesis film under my arm and went out into the world to conquer the film festival circuit and then Hollywood—or at least that was the plan, though it didn't quite work out that way. I spent a few years writing scripts and taking meetings and getting not very far, trying any way I could to get noticed.
All the while I was writing: for five years I had a gig as a daily blogger for mentalfloss.com, and I also wrote for their magazine, contributed to a few books they published through Harpercollins, and wrote for a couple of other publications here and there, as well.
Books
All of which turned into an opportunity to do some work for a small publisher who knew my editors at mentalfloss. That was Quirk Books, who asked me if I was interested in writing a book about Sherlock Holmes for them. I jumped at the opportunity. That was The Sherlock Holmes Handbook (2009).
Next came Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, born out of my love for vintage photography and bizarro stories, and I never looked back.
I still love movies and I still make short films (here are some recent ones) and one day I will make a feature—when the time and the material are right. These days, though, I'm loving being a novelist, a photo collector, and an occasional short filmmaker.
Personal
I live near Los Angeles, California, with my wife, the lovely and talented Tahereh Mafi—who is also a writer, and if you haven't read her lovely and exciting Shatter Me books you're missing out—and we type and travel and drink tea together and it's really quite wonderful. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Fans of the trilogy’s first two books will enjoy Library of Souls for its unique world, fast action, satisfying answers and a thorough tying up of loose ends.
Free Lance-Star
I was blown away by the way the haunting photographs were woven so seamlessly into the incredible plot. And Library of Souls has simply the most perfect ending.
Nikki - Justine Magazine
Oh, my birds, I love this book! I’m obsessed with Ransom Riggs’ wildly creative world packed with heroic, heartwarming characters, supper baddies, and incredible settings like Devil’s Acre and the Library of Souls.
Annalyse - Justine Magazine
Library of Souls will not disappoint.
Forces of Geek
The challenge Riggs faces in Library of Souls is to match the remarkably high standard set by the first two books in the series, either the mind-bending bafflements of the first book or the edge-of-your-seat action of the second. Riggs succeeds, delivering a thrilling conclusion to Jacob’s trilogy.
Paste Magazine
[T]hrilling and satisfying.... [C]haracters, their relationships, and their special abilities help to inform the world-building, and the detailed descriptions set the tone...from humorous to suspenseful to downright terrifying (Gr. 8 & Up). —Billy Parrott, New York Public Library
School Library Journal
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)