"Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" is the first novel by Ransom Riggs, an L.A. based writer and filmmaker. It's a gothic tale with a teenage protagonist, which is why the publisher is marketing it as a young adult novel, but I read it and liked it, and I'm in my 30s. The book came about when Riggs started collecting found photography at flea markets and swap meets about three years ago. He kept coming across strange creepy pictures of kids and felt like he wanted to do something with them. "I was thinking maybe they could be a book, like [Edward Gorey's] 'The Gashlycrumb Tinies,' " he said. "Rhyming couplets about kids who had drowned. That kind of thing."
Riggs had just completed his first book, "The Sherlock Holmes Handbook" for Quirk Books and asked his editor what he could do with the photos. The editor suggested the pictures might inform a novel. "I was like, that sounds like something I kind of always wanted to do," Riggs said. The title came to him immediately and he started constructing a story about a home for children with special powers. He would cast the characters in his novel from the photos that he came across."