Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is a 2011 contemporary fantasy debut novel by American author Ransom Riggs. The story is told through a combination of narrative and a mix of vernacular and found photography from the personal archives of collectors listed by the author.
This young adult book was originally intended to be a picture book featuring photographs Riggs had collected, but on the advice of an editor at Quirk Books, he used the photographs as a guide from which to put together a narrative. Riggs was a collector of photographs, but needed more for his novel. He met Leonard Lightfoot, a well-known collector at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, and was introduced to other collectors. The result was a story about a boy who follows clues from his grandfather's old photographs, tales, and his grandfather's last words which lead him on an adventure that takes him to a large abandoned orphanage on Cairnholm, a fictional Welsh island.
The book has been a New York Times best seller. It reached the No. 1 spot on the Children's Chapter Books list on April 29, 2012, after being on the list for 45 weeks, remaining there until May 20, when it dropped to the fourth spot on the list. The book received generally positive reviews for creative use of vintage photographs in the sepia style, surrealist form, characterization and setting. A sequel, Hollow City, was released on January 14, 2014.
As a child, Jacob Magellan Portman has been fascinated with his grandfather Abraham's stories about surviving as a Jew during World War II, running from man-eating monsters, and living with peculiar children in a secret home guarded by "a wise old bird." As Jacob grows older, he begins to doubt the stories until the arrival of his grandfather's death. Blood-strewn, exhausted, and lying in his back garden on the outskirts of Florida Woods, Abraham's last words are a mystery: "...find the bird in the loop on the other side of the old man's grave on September 3, 1940, and tell them what happened." As his grandfather dies, Jacob catches sight of a horrific monster just like the ones described in Abraham's stories. Soon, he starts experiencing trauma and being plagued with nightmares relating to those monsters. Believing their son to be going crazy, Jacob's parents take him to Dr. Golan, a psychiatrist, who suggests that Jacob go to Cairnholm, Wales, the location of his grandfather's children's home to confront the place of his trauma. On his own, Jacob locates and explores the old house only to find it empty and everything caked in dust. According to the local people, the place is haunted and a bomb had killed all its inhabitants many years ago, on September 3, 1940.
Sensing a connection, Jacob refuses to give up and returns to the house one more time, where he encounters a mysterious girl who can conjure fire with her hands whom he follows, trying to question her after hearing her call out his grandfather's name. They reach the bogs surrounding the house before Jacob realizes that the people of Cairnholm are different, including the patrons at the inn, his father among the absent. Luckily, a confused Jacob is rescued by the girl from before and an invisible boy, who introduce themselves as Emma Bloom and Millard Nullings respectively. A suspicious Emma holds him captive and brings him to the children's home, where he finds it magically transformed to the paradise of his grandfather's stories, complete with the peculiar children and the "wise old bird", who is, in fact, the headmistress Miss Alma LeFay Peregrine (named after the peregrine falcon, a well known bird of prey).
There Jacob is also introduced to other peculiar children apart from Emma and Millard: Bronwyn Bruntley, a girl with incredible strength; Claire Densmore, a little girl with an extra mouth at the back of her head; Olive Abroholos Elephanta, a little girl who is lighter than air; Enoch O'Connor, a boy who can animate non-living things for a short amount of time by transplanting organs; Hugh Apiston, a boy with bees living in his stomach; Fiona Frauenfeld, a girl with an affinity for growing plants; and Horace Somnusson, a boy with prophetic dreams. Jacob is shocked and befuddled by the state of the place, so Olive and Millard explain that they are currently existing in a time loop, a place where time is constantly reversed and where they all relive the same day every day, September 3, 1940. This is all thanks to Miss Peregrine, a special type of peculiar being known as an ymbryne, one who can shapeshift into birds (namely a peregrine falcon after which she is named) and manipulate time. Apart from keeping them alive (the bomb would have killed them otherwise), this time loop also protects the peculiar children from being hunted by hollowgast —humanoid, tentacle-mouthed creatures that devour peculiars. The hollowgast were formed from a cataclysmic explosion that occurred after an experiment in the Siberian tundra went awry. Hollows who have consumed enough peculiars become wights, beings who resemble humans in every aspect save their eyes, which have no pupils. The ultimate goal of the wights is to gain power from the peculiars, as well as morph every one of their fellow hollowgast into wights that will rule the world.
Soon, Miss Peregrine's former mentor Miss Avocet arrives at the loop mad with grief over the kidnapping of her wards to wights, who have executed their plan of raiding loops. Fearing for the children's safety, Jacob is tasked with the job of reporting any suspicious information going on in the outside world. With his comings and goings, Jacob and Emma begin to develop feelings for each other, as well as get a glimpse into his own peculiar self: just like his grandfather, Jacob can see the invisible hollows. Miss Peregrine's fears are confirmed when eyeless sheep bodies begin to pile up, and Martin, a worker in the Cairnholm Local Museum, is killed. Going against Miss Peregrine's orders to not leave the house, Enoch, Bronwyn, Emma, Jacob and Millard escape, and Enoch uses a sheep heart to briefly bring Martin back to life. Martin manages to inform the group of the presence of a wight on the island, but by then it is too late as one appears right behind them, along with a hollow companion. To Jacob's shock, he reveals himself to be Dr. Golan, as well as Jacob's family's hired lawn gardener and Jacob's middle school bus driver. Jacob refuses Golan's offer to join him in finding peculiars, and decides to stay with his friends. Golan sends his hollow after the group, and Emma and Jacob split up from the rest. After a brief scuffle, Jacob kills it with a pair of sheep shears. They make their way back to the orphanage, but discover that Golan has kidnapped Miss Peregrine and Miss Avocet and locked the rest of the children in the house.
Dr. Golan warns them not to attempt to rescue Miss Peregrine and leaves the loop, but Millard manages to sneak out invisibly and follow him. Jacob and his friends follow Millard's tracks and find Golan near a lighthouse trying to catch a boat with his other wight comrades. During the process of saving Miss Peregrine, who is trapped in her bird form, Millard is wounded from a gunshot, but Golan is ultimately killed by Jacob. Just then, the other wights arrive and even though they are able to rescue Miss Peregrine, Miss Avocet is taken away. Returning to the orphanage, they find it destroyed, leaving them having to track down the wights and discover how to help Miss Peregrine. It is then Jacob decides to follow his friends and returns to the present to say goodbye to his father, but promises to return when his mission is finished. Guided by only a prophetic dream from Horace, they set sail to find help.
Otherwise known as syndrigasti (a word meaning "peculiar spirit" in the Old Peculiar language, which is in turn the author's adaptation of Old English, or Anglo-Saxon language), peculiar folk are a branch of humanity possessing a second soul which manifests itself in strange ways such as abnormal characteristics and abilities commonly referred to as peculiarities. Very rarely are peculiar children born to peculiar parents as the essence or gene of peculiarity often skips entire generations, making peculiar population vastly less than that of normal people.
An ymbryne (pronounced IMM-brinn) is a specific kind of female peculiar who can transform into distinct birds, control and manipulate time as she sees fit, and govern the peculiar world. Most essentially, the ability to control time lets these women possess a period of historical time by looping it, creating a potentially eternal sanctuary for peculiars. They often set out into the present-day world to rescue peculiars in dire situations or to search for those without an ymbryne. Ymbryne means "revolution" or "circuit" in Old Peculiar.
The Council of Ymbrynes is the official government and law of peculiardom. Their responsibilities include the maintenance of loop order, the writing or amending of laws on a regular basis, and the determination of sentences for those convicted of a crime. Members are not specified.
Time loops are the fabric of the peculiar world, often referred to as peculiardom. Similar to towns, cities, states, and countries, they act as specific locations. Together they create a vast and quite complex world of varying whereabouts and dates only peculiars are able to enter. Within these loops, peculiars live indefinitely without aging or reliving previous experiences, even as the day around them repeats itself. While it may appear to be a form of eternal youth, it is the suspension of time inevitable. In reality, many, if not all, of Miss Peregrine's children are over fifty years old, but the loop detains them as teenagers and small children physically and mentally. A loop must be reset daily or it will collapse, leaving all peculiars within it exposed to the outside world.
As a result of time loops, those who reside in them may not be able to return to the present day, depending on how long they've been there. In a mere matter of hours outside of the loop, the amount of time evaded will catch up. An example of this is Miss Peregrine's own former ward, a young girl named Charlotte who left the loop while Miss Peregrine was away. She was discovered by police in the mid-1980s and sent to a welfare agency. When Miss Peregrine found her just two days later, she'd already aged thirty-five years. Although she survived the ordeal, the unnatural aging process had caused Charlotte a great deal of mental disorder, and she was sent to live with Miss Nightjar, an ymbryne more suited for her care. The same process of deterioration applies to anything taken out of time loops as another instance was an apple Jacob took back to the inn where he and his father were staying in the present day. He left it on the nightstand next to his bed as he fell asleep that night, but by morning, found it had rotted to the point of disintegrating.
A word meaning "empty spirit." The hollowgast are monsters who feed on peculiars. They were created by a freak-accident in an unethical and illegal experiment conducted by Miss Peregrine's two brothers. Hundreds had joined their cause, and with the aid of misguided but powerful ymbrynes, it was intended to achieve immortality without the limitations of time loops. Instead, it led to a catastrophic collapse that destroyed half of Siberia where the experiment took place. Everyone involved was presumed dead, but their corpses became deformed and crawled back to a lesser, animalistic state of life. Apart from their shadows, hollows are invisible to all but a gifted few including Abraham and Jacob Portman. They are also identified by the groups of large tentacle-like tongues that occupy their grotesquely stretched mouths. It is speculated that this outcome was the result of being reverse-aged to a time before their souls existed, thus the word hollowgast. Their souls having been erased, hollows possess no form of peculiarity, rendering them unable to enter these so called time loops.
If a hollow consumes enough peculiar souls, its original human form is restored, with the exception of irises and pupils leaving the eyes entirely white. Because of this, peculiars refer to these evolved creatures as wights. They possess no extraordinary abilities but are highly skilled in posing as normal people under multiple identities and can even pass into time loops. Much of their existence revolves around procuring peculiars for remaining hollows to devour. Once they set their eyes on a peculiar child, they will follow them around, as they did with Jacob all the way to the island.
All ymbrynes take on last names which correspond to the type of bird into which they can shapeshift (e.g., Miss Peregrine can turn into a peregrine falcon).
Miss Peregrine's spent seventy weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list for children's chapter books. It reached the number one spot on the list on April 29, 2012, after being on the list for forty-five weeks. It remained there until 20 May, when it dropped to the fourth spot on the list. The book dropped off the list on September 9, 2012, after sixty-three weeks.
According to Deborah Netburn for the Los Angeles Times, the best part of the novel is "a series of black-and-white photos sprinkled throughout the book". Publishers Weekly called the book "an enjoyable, eccentric read distinguished by well-developed characters, a believable Welsh setting, and some very creepy monsters."
A sequel, titled Hollow City, was released on January 14, 2014. The novel is set immediately after the first, and sees Jacob and his friends fleeing from Miss Peregrine's to the "peculiar capital of the world", London.
The third installment in the Miss Peregrine's series, titled Library of Souls, was announced in early 2015. It was released on September 22, 2015.
A Map of Days, the first installment of a new trilogy set in the United States and featuring the main protagonists from the original trilogy, was released on October 2, 2018, by Dutton Books for Young Readers (a division of Penguin Group).
On January 14, 2020, the fifth installment, The Conference of the Birds, was released.
On February 23, 2021, the sixth and final book of the second trilogy, The Desolations of Devil's Acre, was released.
An original graphic novel adaptation by Cassandra Jean and Ransom Riggs, called Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children: The Graphic Novel was released in October 2013.
A film adaptation of the book was released in the United States on September 30, 2016. It was directed by Tim Burton from a screenplay by Jane Goldman. Eva Green played Miss Peregrine in the film, along with Asa Butterfield as Jacob, and Ella Purnell as Emma Bloom.