Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

by

Ransom Riggs

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children makes teaching easy.

Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather Character Analysis

Abe is Jacob’s paternal grandfather. Abe is the only person in his family to have escaped the Nazis in Poland in the late 1930s; Miss Peregrine then found him in a refugee camp and brought him back to her children’s home on Cairnholm, Wales. There, Abe got to know other peculiar children and became sweethearts with Emma. He protected the others because his peculiar ability was that he could see hollowgast. But after the bomb struck Miss Peregrine’s home on September 3, 1940, Abe realized that he had a duty to fight the “monsters” and protect his people—both from the Nazis and the hollowgast. He then fought in World War II before relocating to Florida. There, throughout his life, he helped other peculiars hunt down the hollowgast, though this often meant that he was absent from Jacob’s dad’s life. Later in life, Abe tells Jacob all about the monsters and the children, showing Jacob old photos that he’s kept, but Jacob eventually stops believing in his stories and assumes his grandfather is mentally declining. Ultimately, a hollowgast tracks Abe down, and because Jacob’s dad took the key to his gun locker, he is unable to defend himself. Before he dies, he tells Jacob how to find the children’s home to tell them what happened to him. Upon learning that the children’s home and the magic is real, Jacob realizes how heroic his grandfather truly was.

Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather Quotes in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children quotes below are all either spoken by Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather or refer to Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
).
Prologue Quotes

When I was six I decided that my only chance of having a life half as exciting as Grandpa Portman’s was to become an explorer. He encouraged me by spending afternoons at my side hunched over maps of the world, plotting imaginary expeditions with trails of red pushpins and telling me about the fantastic places I would discover one day. At home I made my ambitions known by parading around with a cardboard tube held to my eye, shouting, “Land ho!” and “Prepare a landing party!” until my parents shooed me outside. I think they worried that my grandfather would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I’d never recover—that these fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions—so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad, Jacob’s Mom
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 12-13
Explanation and Analysis:

I guess he’d seen it coming—I had to grow out of them eventually—but he dropped the whole thing so quickly it left me feeling like I’d been lied to. I couldn’t understand why he’d made up all that stuff, tricked me into believing that extraordinary things were possible when they weren’t. It wasn’t until a few years later that my dad explained it to me: Grandpa had told him some of the same stories when he was a kid, and they weren’t lies, exactly, but exaggerated versions of the truth—because the story of Grandpa Portman’s childhood wasn’t a fairy tale at all. It was a horror story.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad
Page Number: 20-21
Explanation and Analysis:

Like the monsters, the enchanted-island story was also a truth in disguise. Compared to the horrors of mainland Europe, the children’s home that had taken in my grandfather must’ve seemed like a paradise, and so in his stories it had become one: a safe haven of endless summers and guardian angels and magical children, who couldn’t really fly or turn invisible or lift boulders, of course. The peculiarity for which they’d been hunted was simply their Jewishness. They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood. What made them amazing wasn’t that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chambers was miracle enough.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

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 knives and armor-piercing pistols. My grandfather’s there in 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 .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 windows, looking for a way in. I point the BB gun at them and pull the trigger, but nothing happens.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Dr. Golan/The Birder
Page Number: 44-45
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

For the first time in months, I fell into a deep, nightmare-free slumber. I dreamed instead about my grandfather as a boy, about his first night here, a stranger in a strange land, under a strange roof, owing his life to people who spoke a strange tongue. When I awoke, sun streaming through my window, I realized it wasn’t just my grandfather’s life that Miss Peregrine had saved, but mine, too, and my father’s. Today, with any luck, I would finally get to thank her.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Miss Alma Peregrine, Jacob’s Dad
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 76
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

It was true, of course, what my dad had said: I did worship my grandfather. There were things about him that I needed to be true, and his being an adulterer was not one of them. When I was a kid, Grandpa Portman’s fantastic stories meant it was possible to live a magical life. Even after I stopped believing them, there was still something magical about my grandfather. To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that the honorable and good and brave person I knew him to be—that was magical. So I couldn’t believe he was a liar and a cheater and a bad father. Because if Grandpa Portman wasn’t honorable and good, I wasn’t sure anyone could be.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Emma Bloom/The Girl, Jacob’s Dad
Page Number: 92
Explanation and Analysis:

“I wonder if it doesn’t explain something, though. Why he acted so distant when you were little.” Dad gave me a sharp look, and I knew I needed to make my point quickly or risk overstepping. “He’d already lost his family twice before. Once in Poland and then again here—his adopted family. So when you and Aunt Susie came along…”

“Once bombed, twice shy?”

“I’m serious. Don’t you think this could mean that maybe he wasn’t cheating on Grandma, after all?”

“I don’t know, Jake. I guess I don’t believe things are ever that simple.” He let out a sigh, breath fogging the inside of his beer glass. “I think I know what all this really explains, though. Why you and Grandpa were so close.”

“Okay…”

“It took him fifty years to get over his fear of having a family. You came along at just the right time.”

I didn’t know how to respond. How do you say I’m sorry your father didn’t love you enough to your own dad? I couldn’t, so instead I just said goodnight and headed upstairs to bed.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Jacob’s Dad (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Aunt Susie
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 101
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

I couldn’t stop myself, so I thought about all the bad things and I fed it and fed it until I was crying so hard I had to gasp for breath between sobs. I thought about how my great-grandparents had starved to death. I thought about their wasted bodies being fed to incinerators because people they didn’t know hated them. 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 and go fight them. What could I do?

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 108
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Yes, it was beautiful and life was good, but if every day were exactly alike and if the kids really couldn’t leave, as Miss Peregrine had said, then this place wasn’t just a heaven but a kind of prison, too. It was just so hypnotizingly pleasant that it might take a person years to notice, and by then it would be too late; leaving would be too dangerous.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Miss Alma Peregrine, Victor
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 213
Explanation and Analysis:

I considered the idea. The sun, the feasts, the friends… and the sameness, the perfect identical days. You can get sick of anything if you have too much of it, like all the petty luxuries my mother bought and quickly grew bored with.

But Emma. There was Emma. Maybe it wasn’t so strange, what we could have. Maybe I could stay for a while and love her and then go home. But no. By the time I wanted to leave, it would be too late. She was a siren. I had to be strong.

“It’s him you want, not me. I can’t be him for you.”

She looked away, stung. “That isn’t why you should stay. You belong here, Jacob.”

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Emma Bloom/The Girl (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad, Jacob’s Mom
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 244
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

She turned serious. “They don’t know where to find us. That and they can’t enter loops. So we’re safe on the island—but we can’t leave.”

“But Victor did.”

She nodded sadly. “He said he was going mad here. Said he couldn’t stand it any longer. Poor Bronwyn. My Abe left, too, but at least he wasn’t murdered by hollows.”

I forced myself to look at her. “I’m really sorry to have to tell you this…”

“What? Oh no.”

“They convinced me it was wild animals. But if what you’re saying is true, my grandfather was murdered by them, too. The first and only time I saw one was the night he died.”

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Emma Bloom/The Girl (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Bronwyn, Victor
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 247-248
Explanation and Analysis:

I was moved by this new idea of my grandfather, not as a paranoiac gun nut or a secretive philanderer or a man who wasn’t there for his family, but as a wandering knight who risked his life for others, living out of cars and cheap motels, stalking lethal shadows, coming home shy a few bullets and marked with bruises he could never quite explain and nightmares he couldn’t talk about. For his many sacrifices, he received only scorn and suspicion from those he loved.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Miss Alma Peregrine, Jacob’s Dad
Page Number: 255
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Are you joking? You couldn’t even protect yourself in high school! You had to bribe that redneck to be your bodyguard. And you’d wet your pants if you so much as pointed a real gun at anyone.

No, I wouldn’t.

You’re weak. You’re a loser. That’s why he never told you who you really were. He knew you couldn’t handle it.

Shut up. Shut up.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Ricky
Page Number: 271
Explanation and Analysis:

I killed it, I thought. I really killed it. All the time I’d spent being afraid, I never dreamed I could actually kill one!

It made me feel powerful. Now I could defend myself. I knew I’d never be as strong as my grandfather, but I wasn’t a gutless weakling, either. I could kill them.

I tested out the words. “It’s dead. I killed it.”

I laughed. Emma hugged me, pressing her cheek against mine. “I know he would’ve been proud of you,” she said.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Emma Bloom/The Girl (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Malthus
Page Number: 307
Explanation and Analysis:

“Is this what you want?” Golan shouted. “Go ahead, burn me! The birds will burn, too! Shoot me and I’ll throw them over the side!”

“Not if I shoot you in the head!”

He laughed. “You couldn’t fire a gun if you wanted to. You forget, I’m intimately familiar with your poor, fragile psyche. It’d give you nightmares.”

I tried to imagine it: curling my finger around the trigger and squeezing; the recoil and the awful report. What was so hard about that? Why did my hand shake just thinking about it? How many wights had my grandfather killed? Dozens? Hundreds? If he were here instead of me, Golan would be dead already, laid out while he’d been squatting against the rail in a daze. It was an opportunity I’d already wasted; a split-second of gutless indecision that might’ve cost the ymbrynes their lives.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Dr. Golan/The Birder (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Emma Bloom/The Girl, Miss Alma Peregrine, Miss Avocet
Page Number: 324
Explanation and Analysis:
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Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children PDF

Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather Quotes in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children quotes below are all either spoken by Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather or refer to Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
).
Prologue Quotes

When I was six I decided that my only chance of having a life half as exciting as Grandpa Portman’s was to become an explorer. He encouraged me by spending afternoons at my side hunched over maps of the world, plotting imaginary expeditions with trails of red pushpins and telling me about the fantastic places I would discover one day. At home I made my ambitions known by parading around with a cardboard tube held to my eye, shouting, “Land ho!” and “Prepare a landing party!” until my parents shooed me outside. I think they worried that my grandfather would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I’d never recover—that these fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions—so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad, Jacob’s Mom
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 12-13
Explanation and Analysis:

I guess he’d seen it coming—I had to grow out of them eventually—but he dropped the whole thing so quickly it left me feeling like I’d been lied to. I couldn’t understand why he’d made up all that stuff, tricked me into believing that extraordinary things were possible when they weren’t. It wasn’t until a few years later that my dad explained it to me: Grandpa had told him some of the same stories when he was a kid, and they weren’t lies, exactly, but exaggerated versions of the truth—because the story of Grandpa Portman’s childhood wasn’t a fairy tale at all. It was a horror story.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad
Page Number: 20-21
Explanation and Analysis:

Like the monsters, the enchanted-island story was also a truth in disguise. Compared to the horrors of mainland Europe, the children’s home that had taken in my grandfather must’ve seemed like a paradise, and so in his stories it had become one: a safe haven of endless summers and guardian angels and magical children, who couldn’t really fly or turn invisible or lift boulders, of course. The peculiarity for which they’d been hunted was simply their Jewishness. They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood. What made them amazing wasn’t that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chambers was miracle enough.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

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 knives and armor-piercing pistols. My grandfather’s there in 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 .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 windows, looking for a way in. I point the BB gun at them and pull the trigger, but nothing happens.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Dr. Golan/The Birder
Page Number: 44-45
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

For the first time in months, I fell into a deep, nightmare-free slumber. I dreamed instead about my grandfather as a boy, about his first night here, a stranger in a strange land, under a strange roof, owing his life to people who spoke a strange tongue. When I awoke, sun streaming through my window, I realized it wasn’t just my grandfather’s life that Miss Peregrine had saved, but mine, too, and my father’s. Today, with any luck, I would finally get to thank her.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Miss Alma Peregrine, Jacob’s Dad
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 76
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

It was true, of course, what my dad had said: I did worship my grandfather. There were things about him that I needed to be true, and his being an adulterer was not one of them. When I was a kid, Grandpa Portman’s fantastic stories meant it was possible to live a magical life. Even after I stopped believing them, there was still something magical about my grandfather. To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that the honorable and good and brave person I knew him to be—that was magical. So I couldn’t believe he was a liar and a cheater and a bad father. Because if Grandpa Portman wasn’t honorable and good, I wasn’t sure anyone could be.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Emma Bloom/The Girl, Jacob’s Dad
Page Number: 92
Explanation and Analysis:

“I wonder if it doesn’t explain something, though. Why he acted so distant when you were little.” Dad gave me a sharp look, and I knew I needed to make my point quickly or risk overstepping. “He’d already lost his family twice before. Once in Poland and then again here—his adopted family. So when you and Aunt Susie came along…”

“Once bombed, twice shy?”

“I’m serious. Don’t you think this could mean that maybe he wasn’t cheating on Grandma, after all?”

“I don’t know, Jake. I guess I don’t believe things are ever that simple.” He let out a sigh, breath fogging the inside of his beer glass. “I think I know what all this really explains, though. Why you and Grandpa were so close.”

“Okay…”

“It took him fifty years to get over his fear of having a family. You came along at just the right time.”

I didn’t know how to respond. How do you say I’m sorry your father didn’t love you enough to your own dad? I couldn’t, so instead I just said goodnight and headed upstairs to bed.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Jacob’s Dad (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Aunt Susie
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 101
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

I couldn’t stop myself, so I thought about all the bad things and I fed it and fed it until I was crying so hard I had to gasp for breath between sobs. I thought about how my great-grandparents had starved to death. I thought about their wasted bodies being fed to incinerators because people they didn’t know hated them. 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 and go fight them. What could I do?

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 108
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Yes, it was beautiful and life was good, but if every day were exactly alike and if the kids really couldn’t leave, as Miss Peregrine had said, then this place wasn’t just a heaven but a kind of prison, too. It was just so hypnotizingly pleasant that it might take a person years to notice, and by then it would be too late; leaving would be too dangerous.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Miss Alma Peregrine, Victor
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 213
Explanation and Analysis:

I considered the idea. The sun, the feasts, the friends… and the sameness, the perfect identical days. You can get sick of anything if you have too much of it, like all the petty luxuries my mother bought and quickly grew bored with.

But Emma. There was Emma. Maybe it wasn’t so strange, what we could have. Maybe I could stay for a while and love her and then go home. But no. By the time I wanted to leave, it would be too late. She was a siren. I had to be strong.

“It’s him you want, not me. I can’t be him for you.”

She looked away, stung. “That isn’t why you should stay. You belong here, Jacob.”

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Emma Bloom/The Girl (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Jacob’s Dad, Jacob’s Mom
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 244
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

She turned serious. “They don’t know where to find us. That and they can’t enter loops. So we’re safe on the island—but we can’t leave.”

“But Victor did.”

She nodded sadly. “He said he was going mad here. Said he couldn’t stand it any longer. Poor Bronwyn. My Abe left, too, but at least he wasn’t murdered by hollows.”

I forced myself to look at her. “I’m really sorry to have to tell you this…”

“What? Oh no.”

“They convinced me it was wild animals. But if what you’re saying is true, my grandfather was murdered by them, too. The first and only time I saw one was the night he died.”

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Emma Bloom/The Girl (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Bronwyn, Victor
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 247-248
Explanation and Analysis:

I was moved by this new idea of my grandfather, not as a paranoiac gun nut or a secretive philanderer or a man who wasn’t there for his family, but as a wandering knight who risked his life for others, living out of cars and cheap motels, stalking lethal shadows, coming home shy a few bullets and marked with bruises he could never quite explain and nightmares he couldn’t talk about. For his many sacrifices, he received only scorn and suspicion from those he loved.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Miss Alma Peregrine, Jacob’s Dad
Page Number: 255
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

Are you joking? You couldn’t even protect yourself in high school! You had to bribe that redneck to be your bodyguard. And you’d wet your pants if you so much as pointed a real gun at anyone.

No, I wouldn’t.

You’re weak. You’re a loser. That’s why he never told you who you really were. He knew you couldn’t handle it.

Shut up. Shut up.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Ricky
Page Number: 271
Explanation and Analysis:

I killed it, I thought. I really killed it. All the time I’d spent being afraid, I never dreamed I could actually kill one!

It made me feel powerful. Now I could defend myself. I knew I’d never be as strong as my grandfather, but I wasn’t a gutless weakling, either. I could kill them.

I tested out the words. “It’s dead. I killed it.”

I laughed. Emma hugged me, pressing her cheek against mine. “I know he would’ve been proud of you,” she said.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Emma Bloom/The Girl (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Malthus
Page Number: 307
Explanation and Analysis:

“Is this what you want?” Golan shouted. “Go ahead, burn me! The birds will burn, too! Shoot me and I’ll throw them over the side!”

“Not if I shoot you in the head!”

He laughed. “You couldn’t fire a gun if you wanted to. You forget, I’m intimately familiar with your poor, fragile psyche. It’d give you nightmares.”

I tried to imagine it: curling my finger around the trigger and squeezing; the recoil and the awful report. What was so hard about that? Why did my hand shake just thinking about it? How many wights had my grandfather killed? Dozens? Hundreds? If he were here instead of me, Golan would be dead already, laid out while he’d been squatting against the rail in a daze. It was an opportunity I’d already wasted; a split-second of gutless indecision that might’ve cost the ymbrynes their lives.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Dr. Golan/The Birder (speaker), Abe Portman/Jacob’s Grandfather, Emma Bloom/The Girl, Miss Alma Peregrine, Miss Avocet
Page Number: 324
Explanation and Analysis: