Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children Literary Elements

Young Adult Fantasy

The Island of Cairnholm, Wales, partly in the present and partly in the year 1940

The novel is narrated by Jacob Portman, a sixteen-year-old boy in search of the truth about his grandfather's past, in first-person past tense.

The beginning of the novel has a mysterious, suspenseful mood, as Jacob attempts to uncover all of the mysteries his grandfather has left him with. Later, the novel's tone becomes more urgent as Jacob and his friends fight the hollows and wights and attempt to save their beloved Miss Peregrine.

Jacob Portman is the protagonist, while the main antagonist is the wight who has taken many forms in Jacob's life, most notably as his psychiatrist, Dr. Golan.

In the first half of the novel, the conflict revolves around Jacob's attempt to solve the mystery of his grandfather's past, while his family and friends believe he is going crazy. In the second half of the novel, Jacob becomes immersed in the conflict that is occurring in the world of peculiar people. They must stop the hollows and wights from killing peculiars and kidnapping ymbrynes in an attempt to use time loops to become completely immortal.

The novel reaches its climax when the wight reveals his identity and a fight ensues, first between Jacob, his friends, and the hollow, and then between the peculiar children and the wight after he kidnaps Miss Peregrine and Miss Avocet.

Jacob tells the story from the perspective of someone who has already lived all of these events, so the prologue of the novel foreshadows what is to come when Jacob separates his life into "Before" and "After" and alludes to some "extraordinary" things that are about to happen to him. Additional foreshadowing occurs when Jacob spots the strange white eyes of one of his grandfather's neighbors—he later realizes that these eyes meant that he was in the presence of a wight (21).

N/A

N/A

See Imagery section.

N/A

Jacob's budding relationship with Emma parallels the relationship that she once had with his grandfather Abe. Much of Jacob's experience in the loop parallels his grandfather's own seventy years before, as he comes to know the peculiar children who reside there and learns about the danger that they face. He even has the same peculiar ability to see hollows as his grandfather did.

N/A

"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." (55)

When Jacob first lays eyes upon the abandoned house, he speaks about it as if it is a creature itself, staring at him with the eyes of a beast that has not been fed in a long time.