Book 1 Project

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Fan Experience

            Ladies and gentlemen! Come one come all! Carnival Toys is proud to announce the latest must-have in the Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children craze: Orphanage Action-Figures! Through a partnership with author Ransom Riggs, Carnival Toys has developed authentic, peculiar action figures of each of the children at the orphanage house, as envisioned by the author himself! We have the fiery Emma, the brutal Bronwyn, invisible Millard and our hero himself, the courageous Jacob! But wait, it gets even better; each action figure comes with their own creepy collector’s photograph, depicting them in all of their peculiar glory. A 12”x12” replica of the orphanage will also be sold separately. Fans of the book both young and old will finally be able to experience the world of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children on their own as they explore the orphanage and experiment with each of the action figures unique powers.

           

           Based on Jacob’s remarkable adventure in the novel, the action figures, photographs, and replica orphanage will be sure to satisfy all your dire cravings. As all fans know, the main focus of the Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children in Jacob’s unlikely journey to Wales where he discovers an orphanage full of extraordinary children, children with powers beyond your wildest imagination! All of the peculiar children live in the orphanage, and therefore the orphanage is the symbol for everything magical and fascinating in the novel. Ransom Riggs describes it as “A bright, happy place –big and rambling…full of light and laughter (Riggs 79). The orphanage is such a key place and symbol in the book that Carnival Toys had no choice but to offer it to its multitude of adoring fans! The main focus of the story though, is obviously the peculiar children themselves. The peculiar children are “peculiar” because they possess what can only be best described as super powers. The idea for the action figures is that it will allow fans everywhere to see and explore with the powers they heard about in the novel. For example, Jacob describes Emma as “The Girl…held a flickering light, which seemed to be a ball of raw flame, attended by nothing more than her bare skin” (Riggs 117). The Emma action figure will feature young Emma holding a ball of fire in her hand! The other action figures will follow this pattern; models of the characters depicting their special abilities. Lastly, the idea for the collectable photographs comes from the fact that antique photographs are intertwined in the book itself! Creepy, eerie, and unsettling images lie around the turn of every page in the novel, and Carnival Toys is here to pass that creepiness onto you! Take this photograph for example, described in the book as “My dad was in this ridiculous pink bunny costume…Grandma took a picture of my Dad crying in the street so she could show my grandfather” (Riggs 85).   

            The Orphanage Action Figures, collectable photographs, and replica orphanage will all be extremely successful because they contain aspects that appeal to both genders and cover a majority of the novel’s target age range (11-18). It’s a well-known truth that children love toys, and at the peak of that love for toys lays a perpetual love for action-figures. Throw in the fact that the Orphanage Action Figures have unique powers and children will flock to the toys. Children who have no experience with the novel will be introduced to it through to toys, broadening the story’s audience. Current fans of the book will be delighted as well. Finally there will be a visual representation of the story for its reader to interact with and enjoy. The hands on experience that the Orphanage replica and the action figures will provide will serve to deepen the fans interest in the story and keep them engaged for as long as possible. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is also inundated with eerie old photographs depicting the peculiar children, and there isn’t a fan alive that would die to get their hands on those photographs! However the greatest reason for the success of the toys lies completely outside of the toys themselves. As luck would have it, the Miss Peregrine sequel, Hollow City, is released on January 2014 and a movie for the first book is being planned for fall 2014, completely the trifecta – toys, movie, and book. Demand will skyrocket, and the world will become a little more peculiar.

Visual Ideas of Fan Experience

The top image is an idea of what Emma's action figure would look like, but obviously it would be in action figure form. The bottom two images represent what the replica orphanage would look like: a large and eerie building in a small and interactive form.

What is a book?

A book is a house. The covers are the roof. The spine is the internal structure that holds the house together. A book is a physical structure, technically speaking. However, if a book is a house, then it can also be a home. The characters roam throughout the book like inhabitants throughout a home. A house is a physical object, but a home is a living, breathing idea. In a book, characters can do anything, they live their lives on the pages in between the covers of the book. Likewise, the members of a family in any particular home fulfill their own personal adventures while living out of their house.

There is something to be said about the physical structure that is a book. The coarse fibers of a page running against your thumb as you flip the page, the weight of the book in your hand as you level it onto an adjacent nightstand, a book's physical presence cannot be understated, and is therefore necessary to take in the story in completion. An author does not type hundreds of pages only to see them condensed into a mere drop of data floating in an infinite cyberspace. An illustrator does not spend hours tediously stenciling out a perfect design only to see it simplified into a basic geometric image, whose quality rivals that of the Paint program. E-Readers, while convenient, destroys the very passion that allows a book to breathe and become a living symbol. Would Gatsby have become a cultural phenomenon had it been confined to applications of a digital device? How clearly could we understand the statements of racism and prejudice present in To Kill A Mockingbird had we read it on computerized screen. Surely the effect would have been lost. Without the physical facets, a story cannot become house. And without a house one cannot have a proper home. The ideas of the text are weakened and experienced only in a diluted and forgettable fashion.

In "Scribble" by Victor LaValle, he makes the argument that books are like toasters: mass produced and therefore void of individual beauty and divinity. My belief that books are like houses both agrees and disagrees with this perspective. Yes, books are mass-produced (as are homes) and therefore there exist a countless number of copies. Housing developers often use the same design and/or structure when building houses, however, each house (and book) will never be exactly the same. How is this possible, you ask? Simple. While the physical aspects are the same, each object goes through a different journey. Identical houses lived in by different families will inherently become very different homes. Just as books owned by different people will become different. There is an endearing and vitalizing power to the footnotes on the pages, the slight wrinkles where the book has been bent, and the loving note from a family member if the book as given as a gift. These countless iterations give each book a unique identity, an identity that can never be achieved by the artificial interface of an E-Reader.







   

Post #1: Why I Read

I read books because it provides me with a fantastical, albeit brief, escape from reality. Day to day life, especially during the high school years, can be very stressful and it wears me down both physically and mentally. After a long day of notes and tests there is nothing more relaxing than being able to jump into the pages of some grand tale or adventure. In a matter of minutes I can become anything: a student at Hogwarts, a teenager fighting for my life during a Japanese Battle Royale, or even one of Miss Peregrine's peculiar children. Throughout my life I have always found reading to be a fun activity. No other activity utilizes the imagination so thoroughly or effectively as reading.

Besides reading for fun, I also read to learn. I am a true believer that reading is the most direct gateway to knowledge. Not only is there a limitless amount of information to be gained from the books themselves, but I have found that even the act of reading helps me learn. The night before a big test, be it anything from Math to Chemistry, I will typically pick up a book and try to crank out a few chapters before bed. It could be that this only works for me, but I've found that I almost always perform better on tests if I had an opportunity to read the night before.