Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children Themes

Sixteen-year-old Jacob Portman has a difficult time growing up—he doesn’t get along with his parents, he has few friends, and he dreads what he feels is his inevitable path: working for his family’s drug store company. He constantly feels anxious, weak, and unremarkable. But when Jacob’s grandfather Abe dies and Jacob visits the magical orphanage where Abe grew up, he begins to come out of his shell. He develops friendships with the “peculiar”…

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children aptly centers on a home for children called “peculiars” who possess magical abilities like conjuring fire with their hands, levitation, or invisibility. The teenage protagonist Jacob learns about this home because his orphaned grandfather Abe lived there in the late 1930s. Peculiars are often outcasts among “common folk” and actively persecuted by monsters called “hollowgast”; it is this mistreatment which leads them to form communities…

Mortality takes on a unique quality in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, as the peculiar children in the titular home are trapped in a “time loop,” meaning they experience the same day over and over again and never age. While at first Jacob sees how the place is a kind of paradise, with the children perpetually playing and relaxing, Jacob gradually realizes how maddening this kind of life would be. His grandfather Abe…

Throughout the book, characters often lie or withhold the whole truth from one another: Jacob’s grandfather doesn’t tell Jacob that they both possess magical abilities, Jacob often lies to his dad about his whereabouts when he’s on Cairnholm Island, and Miss Peregrine and the children often hide the truth about the dangers threatening them at the magical children’s home. Even when lies are meant to protect people, they often have severe consequences like…