Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“And I really did believe him—for a few years, at least—though mostly because I wanted to, like other kids my age wanted to believe in Santa Claus….We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing them becomes too high.” 

The quote conveys the fears that hold Jacob back from trusting and understanding his grandfather early on in the story. These same fears of fantasy pervade many of the early chapters and hold Jacob back from accepting his grandfather’s stories and growing as a character.

“Then, a few years later, when I was fifteen, an extraordinary and terrible thing happened, and there was only Before and After.” 

Before and After fully describe Jacob’s transformation in the story. Before his grandfather’s death, he is full of conflict and distrust. He feels ordinary. After his grandfather’s death, though still full of conflict and distrust, he becomes more open to what might have been true in his grandfather’s stories. Ultimately, Jacob realizes that he is extraordinary.

“Go to the island, Yakob. Here it’s not safe….Find the bird. In the loop. On the other side of the old man’s grave. September third, 1940. Emerson—the letter. Tell them what happened, Yakob.” 

The key words to the entire story, Abraham’s last words provide the motivation for Jacob to learn more about his story and push him to find out what his last words mean in the context of his life. It is important to note that he shares the words only with Dr. Golan, who ultimately uses them to follow Jacob to the loop in order to capture Miss Avocet and Miss Peregrine.

“The truth was that I’d had the dream every night that week. With minor variations, it always went like this: I’m crouched in the corner of my grandfather’s bedroom, amber dusk-light retreating from the windows, pointing a pink plastic BB rifle at the door. An enormous glowing vending machine looms where the bed should be, filled not with candy but rows of razor-sharp tactical knifes and armor-piercing pistols. My grandfather’s there with an old British army uniform, feeding the machine dollar bills, but it takes a lot to buy a gun and we’re running out of time. Finally, a shiny .45 spins toward the glass, but before it falls it gets stuck. He swears in Yiddish, kicks the machine, then kneels down and reaches inside to try and grab it, but his arm gets caught. That’s when they come, their long black tongues slithering up the outside of the glass, looking for a way in. I point the BB gun at them and pull the trigger, but nothing happens. Meanwhile, while Grandpa Portman is shouting like a crazy person—find the bird, find the loop, Yakob vai don’t you understand you goddamned stupid yutzi—and then the windows shatter and glass rains in and the black tongues are all over us.”

Jacob’s dream contains many symbols worth exploring. A pink plastic BB gun suggests both Jacob’s incompetence and his fear—he does not have a real gun, and, when he tries to shoot, he fails. The portion that states, “It takes a lot to buy a gun and we are running out of time,” alludes to the lack of time his grandfather had and how frantic he was to find a weapon with which to defend himself. The windows are a barrier to the monsters, which shatter and allow the knowledge (the monsters) to enter the house. Jacob’s dream speaks to his fears and misunderstandings regarding his grandfather.

“Now the truth seemed obvious: his last words had been just another sleight of hand, and his last act was to infect me with nightmares and paranoid delusions that would take years of therapy and metabolism-wrecking medications to rout out.”

Yet another example of Jacob’s back and forth in trusting his grandfather. Again, he suggests his grandfather has “infected” him, which appears to show Jacob thought his grandfather’s stories were a bad thing. However, they become the opposite when Jacob finally uncovers the truth.

“I stared at it as if trying to read through the cover, unable to comprehend how it had come to occupy my now-trembling hands. No one but Dr. Golan knew about the last words.” 

The collection of Emerson works sparks Jacob’s desire to understand his grandfather once more—a continuation of the rollercoaster emotions he feels about his grandfather. Furthermore, this scene signals a change of location from the safety of his home to the uncertainty of the island on which his grandfather had once lived.

“It ended abruptly at a forest of skeletal trees, branches spindling up like the tips of wet paintbrushes, and for a while the path became so lost beneath fallen trunks and carpets of ivy that navigating it was a matter of faith.” 

The story holds many allusions to trust and faith and this passage is no exception. Jacob is trying to find the children’s home, which up to this point has been allusive. His navigation on faith becomes important because he trusts that he will find the house, and he does.

“What stood before me now was no refuge from monsters but a monster itself, staring down from its perch on the hill with vacant hunger. Trees burst forth from broken windows and skins of scabrous vine gnawed at the walls like antibodies attacking a virus—as if nature itself had waged war against it—but the house seemed unkillable, resolutely upright despite the wrongness of its angles and the jagged teeth of sky visible through sections of collapsed roof….I stood in the sudden breeze wondering what could possibly have done that kind of damage, and began to get the feeling that something terrible had happened here. I couldn’t square my grandfather’s idyllic stories with this nightmare house, nor the idea that he’d found refuge here with the sense of disaster that pervaded it.”

The passage is revealing and an act of foreshadowing all at once. It is revealing in that nature wages a war against the loop that holds the intact house; Miss Peregrine must reset the loop continuously to keep the house from being destroyed. Revealing still is Jacob’s observation that the house appears unkillable, because it is, in the loop at least, and as long as Miss Peregrine resets the loop. Foreshadowing happens simultaneously because Jacob’s grandfather did not find refuge there, but Jacob later finds refuge in the home within the loop.

“I never dug too deep with your grandpa because I was afraid of what I’d find.” 

Franklin’s admission to his son about his own interest in Abraham sheds light on the difference between Jacob and his father. Where his father is driven by fear, Jacob is driven by hope.

“I slammed out of the Priest Hole and started walking, heading nowhere in particular. Sometimes you just need to go through a door.” 

Jacob’s statement that “[s]ometimes you just need to go through a door” could also refer to when he goes through the door to Miss Peregrine’s room in the ruined home, ultimately leading him to find the chest full of photographs, and to when he goes through the loop, a kind of door between two times, and meets the people he is most interested in meeting: the peculiar children his grandfather told stories about.

“‘The noise was dreadful,’ Oggie said. ‘It was like giants stamping across the island, and it seemed to go on for ages. They gave us a hell of a pounding, though no one in town was killed, thank heaven.” 

Not only does Oggie’s story solidify for Jacob that the bombings really happened, but the passage further utilizes fantasy imagery—giants. For Jacob, everything appears unbelievable and unreal until he passes through the loop and meets Miss Peregrine.

“There was no escaping the monsters, not even on this island, no bigger on a map than a grain of sand, protected by mountains of fog and sharp rocks and seething tides.” 

At this point in the story, monsters still represent Nazis to both Jacob and the reader. However, the quote is especially important because it points out the obvious and the unobvious: even having run from the Nazis, Abraham is confronted by them again on the island when they bomb it. Similarly, even on the island, monsters can still reach inhabitants and hurt them, this time in the form of hollowgast. Hollowgast sounds eerily similar to holocaust, reinforcing the targeting of a single group of people (Jews/peculiars) by a physical antagonist.

“It was like a room in Sleeping Beauty’s castle, with cobwebbed candles mounted in wall sconces, a mirrored vanity table topped with crystal bottles, and a giant oak bed.” 

Again, Jacob’s narration reinforces the idea of Abraham’s story being nothing more than a fairy tale. If nothing more, the fantasy allusions remark on Jacob’s ignorance of a time without technology, and therefore, ignorance of his grandfather’s youth.

“I thought about how the children who lived in this house had been burned up and blown apart because a pilot who didn’t care pushed a button. I thought about how my grandfather’s family had been taken from him, and how because of that my dad grew up feeling like he didn’t have a dad, and now I had acute stress and nightmares and was sitting alone in a falling-down house and crying hot, stupid tears all over my shirt. All because of a seventy-year-old hurt that had somehow been passed down to me like some poisonous heirloom, and monsters I couldn’t fight because they were all dead, beyond killing or punishing or any kind of reckoning. At least my grandfather had been able to join the army. What could I do?”

Jacob’s release of emotion frees much of what he has stored inside and hid from his parents and Dr. Golan, opening him up to the possibilities of knowledge that lay ahead. The scene is also important because the reader is able to see the bond Jacob had with his grandfather in a new way, an emotional way that Jacob has not shown the reader or himself up to this point in the novel.

“‘The composition of the human species is infinitely more diverse than most humans suspect,’ she began. ‘The real taxonomy of Homo sapiens is a secret known to only a few, of whom you will now be one. At base, it is a simple dichotomy: there are the coerfolc, the teeming mass of common people who make up humanity’s great bulk, and there is the hidden branch—the crypto-sapiens, if you will—who are called syndrigast, or ‘peculiar spirit’ in the venerable language of my ancestors. As you have no doubt surmised, we here are of the latter type.’ ” 

Miss Peregrine’s explanation plays a large role in Jacob’s understanding as well as the reader’s understanding of something foreign. It also sets up the dinner Jacob is about to have with some peculiar children and opens him up to the possibilities of their abilities.

“Peculiar traits often skip a generation, or ten. Peculiar children are not always, or even usually born to peculiar parents, and peculiar parents do not always, or even usually, bear peculiar children. Can you imagine, in a world so afraid of otherness, why this would be a danger to all peculiar-kind?” 

The passage is especially important because it sets up the revelation about Jacob’s own abilities as well as the ability his grandfather had. Additionally, “in a world so afraid of otherness” alludes not only to the dichotomy of ordinary versus peculiar, but also the fear Nazi Germany had toward Jews, an issue in the background of the novel. The safe haven the loop provides is all the more important because of these dichotomies.

“I felt relieved; at least that part of his life was as I had understood it to be. There was one more think I wanted to ask, though, and I didn’t quite know how to put it.

‘Was he—my grandfather—was he like…’

‘Like us?’

I nodded.

She smiled strangely. ‘He was like you, Jacob.’ And she turned and hobbled toward the stairs.” 

Jacob’s understanding of his grandfather is being built by the information Miss Peregrine provides, and his relief that part of the story fits the description he was once given begins to open him up further to receiving a better understanding of his grandfather. Miss Peregrine’s sidestep around the question of whether Abraham was peculiar or not is a way to keep Jacob’s ability hidden, but it foreshadows the admission he receives from Emma later in the novel.

“Though in a million superficial ways it would be identical to the day before—the same breeze would blow and the same tree limbs would fall—my experience of it would be new. So would the peculiar children’s. They were the gods of this strange little heaven, and I was their guest.” 

Jacob begins to view the peculiar children as something untouchable—godlike. Although he understands that his experience of the loop will change each day, he does not entirely grasp what that means for his future: he will become equal to those around him and his experience will change from that of an ordinary day to an extraordinary day when he learns about his ability.

“And do you think it’s wise to discuss events in the future with children from the past?” 

The implications of sharing information outside Jacob’s time are not fully realized in the book, but it is alluded to as a danger to the children. The peculiar children are unaware of the future and their understanding of it can cause dissent among the ranks, particularly when they cannot leave for fear of quick death.

“He could see the monsters. The moment she said it, all the horrors I thought I’d put behind me came flooding back. They were real. They were real and they’d killed my grandfather.”

For most of the book, Jacob has worked to come to terms with the idea that some of his grandfather’s stories were false. Jacob effectively puts behind him the memory and idea of monsters, particularly the tentacle mouthed monster he saw the night Abraham died. He worked to remove fear, and this passage describes Jacob’s fear once more. Monsters mean he will be pursued (in whatever form that comes), and monsters mean danger for those around him.

“Stay or go—neither option seemed good. How could I possibly stay here and leave behind everything I’d known? But after all I’d learned, how could I go home?” 

Jacob comes to realize that he is no longer ignorant. Having knowledge can change an individual; it changes Jacob’s understanding of the world and of his grandfather. To echo Miss Peregrine’s question about sharing the future with children of the past, how can Jacob share with his world the experiences he has had inside the loop?

“I came to the place where the path emerged from the woods. In one direction lay home and everything I knew, unmysterious and ordinary and safe.

“Except it wasn’t. Not really. Not anymore. The monsters had murdered Grandpa Portman, and they had come after me. Sooner or later, they would again.

Again solidifying his similarity to his grandfather, Jacob contemplates whether to take the safe way out or to conquer his fears and face the monsters head on. Ultimately, Jacob chooses the same option as his grandfather, only this time, danger means staying inside the loop rather than leaving it.

“It was September fourth, and for the first time in a very long time, the days were moving again. Some of them claimed they could feel the difference; the air in their lungs was fuller, the race of their blood through their veins faster. They felt more vital, more real.

“I did too.” 

Rather than standing in time, the peculiar children are moving forward again. They can look to the future and anticipate new adventures for the first time in a long time. It presents an interesting opportunity for emotional growth for all the peculiar children, something Jacob is uniquely equipped to handle and help them with. For the first time, Jacob has become a beacon of hope and help.