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One of the best YA novels I've read (not that I've read a whole lot of them). It's a surprisingly intense story, with lots of suspense and some pretty brutal moments (as you might guess from the premise). There were a few moments where I saw what was coming a mile off, but it works because it builds suspense: All such developments are basically Bad News for everyone concerned. The characterizations are strong, and Collins avoids some of the excesses of the Harry Potter series by not methodically introducing all the competitors or spending time on characters who don't fill a role in the story. There's very little waste here.

My biggest detraction is that the climactic show-down of the Games is something of a let-down, and the book ends rather abruptly (though it's clear Collins intended it to be a series from the outset. But overall, it's a book that lives up to the hype, and I'll be moving on to the second volume next week.

A rare book that attracted my attention on the bookstore shelves, I feared that it would end up basically being the original X-Men (teenagers with super-powers!) written by someone who doesn't really understand the genre. What I hoped it would be was a melancholy mystery of a lost and forgotten people. The hero Jacob's teenaged angst and the advent of time manipulation ensured it was much more the latter than the former: once Jacob discovered what happened to Mrs. Peregrine's school, the mystery element is over, and it turns into an exploration of the peculiar students, and the threats they face in the world.

The parallels between this book and Harry Potter are clear (though whether they're intentional is less clear), and the themes of "finding out you're special" and "finding a place where you belong" are integral to both stories, although not as well followed through here. The villains of the story are highly contrived, making them seem like monsters in an old comic book rather than having real menace. Overall the first half of the book is the best, and it goes downhill from there. It's the first in a series, but I'll probably stop here.