The trailer for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, based on the best-selling young-adult book by Ransom Riggs ’01, has been released by Twentieth Century Fox to promote the film’s Sept. 30 release.
With millions of copies sold, Riggs’ novel has spent more than two years on the New York Times best-seller list and has been named one of "100 Young Adult Books to Read in a Lifetime" by Amazon. The highly anticipated sequel, Hollow City, also debuted on the best-seller list and will be followed by the final book of the series, Library of Souls, which hits shelves in September.
“I was convinced it was so wacky that it would just be a novelty gift item and disappear quickly,” Riggs, an English major, said in a 2014 interview with the Alumni Bulletin. “I also figured it would hit the best-seller list for one week and that it would be a nice moment I’d always remember before going back to my normal life. But it stayed. It stayed and stayed and stayed, and it’s still on it.”
Lauded for its strange mix of fantasy and eerie vintage photography, the book follows 16-year-old Jacob on his journey to a remote island off the coast of Wales in search of clues about his grandfather’s shadowy life and violent death. In the film adaptation, Allison Janney '82 portrays Jacob's psychiatrist, Dr. Golan.
“I was delighted to read Ransom's first novel, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, and find it as strange and wondrous as he is,” tweeted John Green ’00, a Kenyon classmate and friend of Riggs. “May the movie introduce many to Ransom's brilliant imagination, which has inspired and thrilled me for 19 years.”
Peculiar Best-Seller: Ransom Riggs '01, author of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, talks about his peculiar path to the best-seller list.