Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Review from Booklist Reviews:

On the brink of his sixteenth birthday, something terrible happens to Jacob-something so terrible that it splits his life into two parts: Before and After. Before, he was an ordinary young man with a peculiar but doting grandfather. After, he discovers he isn't so ordinary after all. Nor are the "peculiar children" he meets at Miss Peregrine's home. Riggs' debut uses the framework of a horror novel to tell a more far-reaching tale with symbolic overtones of the Holocaust. Though the author's skill does not always match his ambition-his pacing is particularly uneven-his premise is clever, and Jacob and the children are intriguing characters. The book is made even more intriguing by the inclusion of a number of period photographs that seem almost Victorian in character and that expand the oddness of the proceedings. An open ending suggests the possibility of a sequel.