I guess sometimes writers just get tired.

This was my impression after reading Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs.

I, admittedly, wasn’t excited about reading the book initially. I was excited by an invitation to join a book club and embrace my true nerd by discussing books with others. But, when you’re in a book club, they want you to read the book. Enter Miss Peregrine.

A cross between Harry Potter (which I did not enjoy) and Nanny McPhee (which I loved), the book follows Jacob as he travels to an island near Wales trying to better understand the last utterances of his dying grandfather. On the island, Jacob discovers the Miss Peregrine’s Home and begins to realize that the strange photos his grandfather showed him as a child might not have been manipulated.

I was taken with the book when I first started reading. I should have suspected something was amiss when my favorite sentences were the first in the prologue.

“I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After.”

The lines certainly get your attention and are easily recognizable as something we’ve all experienced—the before and after of a major life event.

The book continued building from there and was an enjoyable read until the end. In the last few chapters, the story line became overly elaborate and confusing. Then, the book just ended. It was almost as if the writer just got tired of writing.

Overall, I don’t regret having read the book. Book clubs are fun, you know? It’s worth a read if you are looking for something peculiar, or if you just like this young fantasy type of read. Don’t waste your time on it if you have a list of other things you’re interested in reading.

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For 18 years, Jaycee Dugard wished on the moon.

Some of Jaycee’s wishes were the same as those of other young girls. She wanted to learn to drive, to swim with dolphins and to fall in love.

Other things Jaycee desired were much different. She wanted to live in a house instead of a tent. She wanted to urinate in a toilet instead of a bucket. She wanted her two young daughters to be allowed to attend school. She longed to rewind her life to the day when she was just an 11-year-old girl walking to the bus stop. If she could go back in time, perhaps Jaycee could avoid being kidnapped and the 18 years of abuse that followed.

Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped June 10, 1991 by Phillip and Nancy Garrido. She spent the next 18 years living in a series of sheds and tents in her captors backyard.

When she had the emotional courage to look at the moon, she wished for one thing more than anything else. She wanted to see her mother. She wanted to debate which type of moon was better and hear her mother sing a little song about the moon to her.

For nearly two decades, every system put into place to protect innocent people like Jaycee from monsters like the Garridos failed repeatedly. Jaycee lived a nightmare that most of us could not survive.

In another amazing act of strength, Jaycee shares her story in the book A Stolen Life: A Memoir.

The writing in the book is pure, simple and immature. It is not the writing of seasoned author, but it doesn’t matter. The strength and resilience in the authors character carry through the pages.

Jaycee Dugard never got to go to the prom. She’ll never experience the lightheaded tingle that results from your first kiss. She didn’t walk across the stage to collect her diploma. She didn’t watch her true love’s tears of wonder as their first child was born.

Jaycee was robbed of so much of the normalcy that every young girl deserves. The people who stole her teen years were the kind who don’t deserve to exist.

Jaycee had another wish for her future that she wrote in a journal and shared in her book. She wanted to write a bestseller. She deserves at least that.

Teenage pregnancy and knitting are unrelated. Yet, Barbara Delinsky attempts to weave them together in the story of a yarn dying high school principal and her daughter’s pregnancy pact.

Not My Daughter is about three teenage girls who make a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. The girls’ mothers also are best friends (and partners in a knitting business) who must deal with the small-town social implications of their daughters’ choices.

This book was overly-detailed in areas not applicable to the primary plot. Specifically, the knitting and yard-dying narrative bogged down the story, making me feel like I sometimes was forcing myself to keep reading.

Overall, this is not a book I recommend. There are just too many other options to drudge through a mediocre story.

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