Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs

“It had become one of the defining truths of my life that, no matter how I tried to keep them flattened, two-dimensional, jailed in paper and ink, there would always be stories that refused to stay bound inside books. It was never just a story. I would know: a story had swallowed my whole life.”

The "final installment" of Miss Peregrine's was a surplus of ebb and flow. There were moments of high anxiety action and moments that dragged sleepily onward. The photographs were fewer and less quirky than in the previous two books, and when they appeared, the dialogue had to go out of its way to include the photos. This book probably could have been improved upon by removing the photos and all descriptions of them.

Jacob and Emma are racing against time to save all their friends, the ymbrynes, and all of Peculiardom... But the story of Jacob and Emma, heroes of a children's book, seemed at odds with the story of Jacob and Emma the-mutant-teenage-couple. Ransom couldn't really tell both stories at once, but he was determined to try anyway.

The sense of humor and sense of adventure that made the first two books so good is still here, but the plot isn't as tightly woven. When things spiral too far out of control or toward an emotionally unacceptable climate a little deus-ex-machina solved everything. Problems magically course corrected whether the correction made sense or not.

Overall, this was a fun book, but lacked depth. Absolutely worth reading if you took the time to read the first two, but not as charming as the first book.

Original posted on Goodreads 1/11/2019. 3 Stars.