Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children



Riggs, Ransom. 2011.Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Philadelphia, PA :Quirk Books. ISBN: 978-1-594-513-3. Paperback $7.67 Age 13+

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was” (p. 347). Ever since he could remember, Jacob Portman’s grandfather has regaled him with extraordinary tales of adventure, filled with strange and amazing people. As he grew up, Jacob began to see just how silly his grandfather’s tales were. After all, little girls can’t levitate by themselves, nor can they create fire with their bare hands. Jacob begins to accept his grandfather’s tales as mere stories he’s told to protect himself from the harsh realities of his actual life: that he was sent to a home for refugee children at the beginning of a horrible war, and that his entire family perished in the Holocaust. The monsters his grandfather has been fighting and hiding from for his entire life were, in reality, only human. That is, of course, until he finds his grandfather horribly wounded in the woods, and catches a glimpse of a creature that would haunt his dreams for months. In an attempt to dispel the nightmares and deal with his grief, Jacob and his father set out to the very island his grandfather had lived on during the war. As he explores the island, Jacob stumbles across a strange girl and follows her through a tunnel. Coming through the end, he finds himself no longer in present time, but in the past. September 3, 1940 to be exact. While Jacob is trying to wrap his head around his new (yet familiar) surroundings, he finds himself face to face with the strange characters from his grandfather’s stories. And if levitating girls can be real, then what does that mean for the monsters he was hiding from?

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