Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs
The Third Novel of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children
[Editor’s Note: This review contains some spoilers for the first two books in the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series.]
In the introduction to Talking Pictures: Images and Messages from the Past, Ransom Riggs explains how he came by his habit of frequenting flea markets to collect some of the mystifying “found photographs” that populate his best-selling novel, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Riggs’ fascination with other people’s discarded photos often derives not from a photo itself but from the context suggested by a few revealing words scrawled on the back. For Riggs, these inscriptions bring faded images into focus; an otherwise-dull photo becomes “a scene imbued with pathos and drama, the strength of which has little to do with composition or tone or even, really, the subject of the photo itself.”
Riggs is far from the first novelist to recognize the story-supporting power of real photographs. Perhaps the most famous appearance of embedded photographs in a novel of the last half-century came in Timothy Findley’s The Wars, in which Findley used striking photos to introduce an anchor of authenticity to a story that exposed the distance between constructed narrative and historical reality.
In Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Riggs uses photographs to underscore distance as well. For 16-year-old misfit Jacob Portman, the obsession with his grandfather’s bizarre photos and equally outlandish stories puts him at odds with his parents. His grandfather’s vintage photographs, reproduced in black and white in the book, depict people who couldn’t possibly exist in real life: a levitating girl, a skinny teenage boy lifting a boulder with one hand, a girl wielding a fireball, an invisible boy depicted headless and handless in a stuffed suit of clothes. Rather than lending credence to the tales of his grandfather’s adventures with these kids, somehow they just make the stories seem more implausible.
Of course, as Miss Peregrine’s many readers know, the stories are fact and the pictures are real. Jacob himself discovers the truth when he pieces together clues in the pictures and tracks down the kids at a Welsh orphanage. They’re peculiar children, each of them gifted with a useful but socially unacceptable superpower, and they live under the protection of an “ymbryne” named Miss Peregrine.