Books: A Map of Days By Ransom Riggs (2018)

“Having defeated the monstrous threat that nearly destroyed the peculiar world, Jacob Portman is back where his story began, in Florida. Except now Miss Peregrine, Emma, and their peculiar friends are with him, and doing their best to blend in. But carefree days of beach visits and normalling lessons are soon interrupted by a discovery—a subterranean bunker that belonged to Jacob’s grandfather, Abe. Clues to Abe’s double-life as a peculiar operative start to emerge, secrets long hidden in plain sight. And Jacob begins to learn about the dangerous legacy he has inherited—truths that were part of him long before he walked into Miss Peregrine’s time loop. Now, the stakes are higher than ever as Jacob and his friends are thrust into the untamed landscape of American peculiardom—a world with few ymbrynes, or rules—that none of them understand.”

Much of A Map of Days is just a long set for what is a new arc for Jacob Portman, which is not saying it’s a bad thing, but there are a lot of set pieces he and friends need to go through before we get to the point of the fourth novel. And even though the plot is not exactly original, author Ransom Riggs does open his series a bit, moving the action from Europe to America and I give him credit for not just rehashing what came before.

After a somewhat slow start –the typical fish-out-of-water concept of kids taken from the past and tossed into the modern world- the book eventually gets going. Yearning to more about his late grandfather, Jake and his fellow Peculiar friends, set out on a road trip to find (eventually) another recruit, a young peculiar named Noor. Much like Jacob, Noor appears to have a very powerful gift, one that appears many people in Americanized peculiar world are now willing to do anything to posses.

Riggs creates a tangled America of peculiars here, where many live in isolated time loops, afraid of not only the normals, but others like them. No longer are peculiars working and trusting each other like in the Devil’s Acre, because there is a mighty fear, along with a schism, within the many syndicates, gangs, boroughs that make up the American peculiars. Late in the book, though, we begin to see why, as there is some shadowy organization everyone fears, one that has helicopters and Men In Black vans.

Meanwhile, if you like sudden, almost savage-like violence mixed with some snark and low-brow humor, you’ll find that unchanged from the first series. As with the others, we also get a set of new photographs that serve touchstones for the many set pieces. There is pacing issues at the beginning, and the series continues to shadow Harry Potter at times (and X Men), but there are some genuine thrills here and I found the book well worth the three year wait.