Book Review

A Map of Days, Ransom Riggs.
The fourth book of the Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children series and the first book of a separate trilogy.
This one was kind of uneven for me. I don't know if it was just my mood going into it (I was still considerably distracted from the last series I read) or if the quality had actually slipped some, but I had a hard time getting into this one. The plot holes and inconsistencies that I was happy to forgive in the first three seemed to stand out like sore thumbs in this one. It appeared to be leaning to an almost Harry Potterish sort of parallel at the very beginning, which seemed like a cop out. And of course the author just had to take a minute to bash America because it's the cheapest, easiest, though talentless, type of writing to fill the slow moving plot. But still, I stuck with it because I still like the peculiar fantasy elements and I liked the general direction that Jacob was going. It's full of great ideas to continue fleshing out the world by introducing the more complex governing structure for both the British and American Peculiars now that the big threat from the first series was defeated. That alone fills in some of the gaps from the earlier books. It goes into details about Jacob's grandfather's life and how he worked as a rogue Peculiar in America and puts Jacob on the path to follow in his work. That comes in to focus towards the end and that's when it starts to really become interesting. This new type of journey for Jacob had to happen if any more books were to be written in this series. But the transition between the series was a rough one.
It's the kind of downer that one normally associates with the middle book of a trilogy. His parents and normal family members had to be written out of the equation, but the process is sadder than expected, and leaves some of those plot holes mentioned above. He had to have a huge failure to learn a lesson. That's never fun. He had to be released from his relationship with Emma, which was always a little strange anyway to be honest. The team of Peculiars he's bonded with also had to split up... at least temporarily. I personally think they'll all be on the same page together by the 6th book. And it took an awfully long time to find it's way to what I see as the real starting point of this new storyline which looks very interesting and I'm all in on getting the next two books to find out how it goes.