☆Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
☆Hollow City (2nd in series)
If I were to tell you every intimate detail of this series, it would end up being more confusing to you than if you were to read it yourself. However, this series, so far, has made such an impact on me that I decided I want to tell you more in some detail of what's going on. Maybe then you will really want to read it.
The first book starts with the main character, Jacob Portman, explaining how his grandpa would tell him stories from when he was younger. As a child, Jacob loved hearing about them, but once he started sharing them to others at school or at home, kids made fun of him, and his family would tell him that none of it was true. That his grandpa was telling these stories to make them sound more like fairytales as a way to hide what horrors that he actually faced as he grew up.
Jacob's grandfather sought refuge in this home away from the war that reeked havoc in his home country of Poland. (WW1) After hearing about these stories, and everyone else telling Jacob that none of this talk of peculiar children and monsters weren't true, he admitted to his grandpa that he didn't believe any of it.
The stories themselves seemed out of this world, about a group of peculiar children who lived together in this huge house on a small island off the mainland of Britain. These children were kept safe by the headmistress, who has the power to turn into a bird. Of course there's a whole purpose for why that is, but that's where reading the book itself would be easier than me explaining it to you. But just as Jacob's grandfather lived there hiding from the enemies of war, the peculiar children also hid from the monsters he often told Jacob about.
So these children were peculiar all in different ways. Think of peculiar as being magical, each one with a special talent. One that could fly, one that was invisible, one had bees living inside of his stomach, one that could manipulate plants, one that could produce fire from her hands, and many more.
Once Jacob was 15, he believed his grandfather was suffering from dementia, but found out later that wasn't the case at all. He gets a call while he's at work, his grandpa desperately trying to find the key to the gun cabinet to protect himself from the monsters. So Jacob goes to his house to check on him and finds him in the woods behind his house, evidently attacked by some creature, who Jacob actually sees right there beside them.
But of course, after that's all said and done, no one would believe that this "monster" his grandfather always warned him about had actually existed, let alone killed the poor old man. So his parents insist on him seeing a psychiatrist. That goes on for a while, and at one point the Doctor was trying to help Jacob make sense of his grandfather's last words, clues. Which eventually brings him to the island where the peculiar children live.
Once he gets a chance to find the home, he sees that it's been destroyed completely from bombs during the wartime. However, he stumbled upon something, or rather someone who leads him back through the past where he meets the famous peciliar children his grandfather always told him about. How he travels back in time is where it gets a little confusing, well if I explained it, it would be.
So from the moment he meets these peculiar children he's learning bit by bit of their history, and then eventually that history catches up to them. He finds himself along side them on a quest to stay alive. That's where the first book ends.
Then the second starts from the end of the first and continues on through a long journey of time travelling. All in an effort to save Miss Peregrine, their headmistress and bird as apparently she's stuck in her bird form and cannot transform back to her human self.
The entire second book is a great adventure. The author takes you through each step of the way with Jacob and the children on their quest to save Miss Peregrine, and along the way they find themselves in some dire situations, some of which leave you holding your breath with worry for their sake as if you were right there with them. The obstacles they face are always different, yet similar in some ways, and each one they find a new way to overcome them.
It's definitely more action packed and suspenseful than the first book. And the end of it has a much more intense chiffhangar than the first. The first book ended on a somewhat melancholy note, but everyone is accounted for and in a safe situation, as opposed to the second which makes you question what might have happened next.
Well, we won't know until the third book is published in September. Oh! I can't wait!
