I was on Instagram this morning, when I came across an ad for the fourth book in this series. I didn't even read the third, because this series, in my opinion, is extraordinary overrated and dull. I'm going to take about about just the first book because I can barely remember the second at all.

This book contains interesting old photos of children who are "peculiar" i.e they have some form of basically a superpower. These photos are all real, though some of them were faked historically and some are from freak shows.

These photos are the best parts of the book, honestly.

So the plot of this first book is that this kid Jacob (who's 16) grew up with stories from his grandfather about him fighting in the second world war and the orphanage he grew up in, where the kids had special powers. Jacob always thought they were just stories, but when his grandfather is killed by one of what is a race of villains in this story (I can't even remember what they're called because they're so bloody dull, I think they basically suck the powers out of peculiar children?) Jacob goes to find this old orphanage he grew up in.

Basically it's still there, exactly as it was during the war. It's stuck in a time loop, stuck just before a bomb hit it, protected by the powers of its founder Miss Peregrine, who can turn into a peregrine.  All of the kids in the orphanage have different powers, and Jacob gets to know them, especially Emma Bloom, who has fire powers.

Basically these weird creatures destroy the time loop and they all have to leave before the bombs hit, end of book yay. Also Jacob and Emma become a thing, and wait for it, she was once his grandfather's girlfriend.

His grandfather left the time loop to be a solider, and left her behind, something she's pretty fucking angry about because he said he would come back and never did, and she's also pissed that he met another girl and got married and had kids and had a life while she was stuck in the orphanage.

That's good, that's a good thing right there, but WHY THE FUCK DOES SHE THEN DATE HIS GRANDSON THAT'S SO FUCKING WEIRD, HER ENTIRE CHARACTER IS RUINED.

Also Jacob has literally no personality. Absolutely none. He's a whiny, selfish, irritating character who spends so many pages whining about the wealth his family has, like wow my heart bleeds, Jacob.

He has no friends, oh boo hoo, it's probably because you're a pretentious idiot who uses big words and annoys people. His parents are boring and awful to him, just to give him a reason to ruin away to the orphanage, which you can predict will happen in the first few pages of the book.

Emma is "love interest" and that's it, that's her personality.

The story is written pretty badly too, and the pictures could have been such a good addition but just end up being confusing and weird. It's mostly that a character is like, "Hey Jacob look at this photo" and then you turn the page and see the photo. It seems as well that the author pretty much structured the story around the photos rather than the other way around, because a lot of the photos have literally no reason to be there so the author just added in this random character so they'd have some relevance. Like I think at one point he puts in a picture of this kid doing something weird and then a character says something like "oh yeah this one kid years ago could do this" and that's that, that's it, the picture has no relevance at all.

Most of the characters in this are useless and serve absolutely no relevance at all. I'm struggling to even remember the other characters, though I know there was one kid called Enoch who could animate dead bodies or something, and this girl who was really strong, but who were both useless and did nothing for the story at all. I'm not joking when I say I can't remember anybody else, because Miss Peregrine herself was cardboard.

They made a movie but I haven't seen it, nor do I want to ever.