Tales of the Peculiar by Ransom Riggs

I was initially torn between getting my own copy of Tales of the Peculiar, since I heard that the binding was beautiful, and borrowing an ecopy from the library and eventually the cheapo in me won (though if the paperback is substantially different/1000x better please let me know).

Tales of the Peculiar is a book set in the Miss Peregrine series! If you haven't read the trilogy, it's the story of the brave and peculiar children who fight the monsters in the world. I finally finished the series a few weeks back and it was fantastic!

Anyway, this book played a pretty big part in the series, and since it is part of the trilogy, Tales of the Peculiar is supposedly authored by Millard Nullings, the invisible boy.

The book itself is a collection of ten of the tales that the peculiar children heard and supposedly contain clues to where other loops are found. One story, The Tale of Cuthbert, is actually mentioned and plays a role in the trilogy. The other nine stories were completely new to me. Each tale comes with a beautiful illustration.

I am going to be honest and say that while I enjoyed these extremely strange tales, I did not get any references to hidden worlds and such unless they were very obvious, like the story of the first Ymbryne or about the peculiar pigeons. But the stories are enjoyable (and more than a little unsettling) even without the context of the trilogy.

Millard Nullings, as editor, occasionally adds forwards and even alternate endings to the stories. I found these to be really interesting and if there was an annotated version (in those fake but legible handwriting fonts), with notes and deductions scribbled in the margins, I would probably buy my own copy.

If you are a fan of the Miss Peregrine series, you will definitely want to read this. If you haven't read this, I think you can still enjoy the stories as a short story anthology, but the concept of peculiars will not make as much sense. So you might as well start with the first book of the series.