Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children meets The Addams Family is what ultimately sold this book to me – give me dark, brooding, gothic tales any day. But let’s be clear for a second, The Addams Family are BIG shoes to fill and they will always and forever remain top tier on the ghoulish, chaotic clan-o-meter. The Zarrin Family sit comfortably at mid point. There are a whole lot of fanged snouts, sinister shadows and ghostly encounters lurking deep within the pages of this deliciously dark book but the characters felt empty and disjointed and the plot just plain perplexing. Rose Szabo writes beyond the weird, instead boldly stepping into an otherness that is unapologetically and beautifully strange. Some readers are gonna love it, others not so much. If I had to some this book up in two words it would be, imperfectly peculiar.
Fans of Rory Power’s Wilder Girls will devour this.
One side point though, the title gave me serious Little Red Riding Hood vibes but the plot couldn’t be further from this. This is no fairytale folks! Also, thumbs up to the US cover - it's so eerily enchanting!
Get your copy from Bookshop UK here.