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 to defend themselves. In endowing the children with magic, the novel ultimately suggests that the children’s differences are actually what make them special and enable them to find belonging and protection in a world that often targets them.
The book establishes how the children’s “peculiarities” and differences single them out and place them in danger. When Miss Peregrine explains to Jacob what peculiars are, she notes that in recent centuries, “common folk,” or non-peculiar people, turned against peculiars. She states, “The Muslims drove us out. The Christians burned us as witches. Even the pagans of Wales and Ireland eventually decided that we were all malevolent faeries and shape-shifting ghosts.” These historical examples illustrate how people often fear differences and target others for being different. Even in the modern age, Miss Peregrine emphasizes, “peculiar offspring of common parents are often abused and neglected in the most horrific ways.” Again, any differences that the children have can make them immediate outcasts, even among the people who are supposed to love them. As if that weren’t bad enough, the children are also persecuted by evil beings called hollowgast and wights—creatures that were at one time peculiar but whose souls have been completely corrupted. The hollows have an intense desire to feast on peculiar flesh so that they can become higher beings called wights, and so these monsters represent another way in which the peculiars are persecuted simply for being who they are.
But even though magic sets them apart, the book underscores how magic also provides the children with a sense of belonging and community. When Jacob first arrives at Miss Peregrine’s home, he sees that it is “exactly the paradise [his] grandfather had described,” providing the children with a safe haven away from the outside world. So, while magic sets them apart, it is also what has brought them together to form their idyllic community. Jacob personally experiences this community as well. While he has largely felt like a loner and an outsider in Florida, a girl at the home named Emma tells him that he “belong[s] here,” with the other children. She admits Jacob is peculiar, too, and it is this quality that enables him to build friendships and become a part of their adopted family. Jacob finds such a deep sense of belonging, in fact, that he chooses to stay with the peculiar children rather than return to his old life. In this way, the book emphasizes that the magic has provided Jacob with a new community, as he knows his parents could never fully understand the magic or his decision to leave home.
The children’s differences also protect them, demonstrating how magic doesn’t only make them outcasts, but it is actually what makes them special and helps them survive. Jacob is the clearest example of this idea: his peculiarity is that he can see the hollowgast that are coming after them, whereas other people can’t. While this makes “common folk” believe that Jacob is crazy and makes them want to avoid him, it helps him provide the other peculiar children with protection from the monsters. The same is true of many of the other children. Enoch’s ability to revive dead people is what helps them figure out that the hollowgast and wights have arrived on Cairnholm Island; Millard’s invisibility prevents him from being seen and captured by the wights; Emma’s ability to conjure fire and Bronwyn’s strength help them fight a wight named Dr. Golan, who threatens them with a gun. In all of these examples, the children’s magic is what saves the day, showing how it makes them special and provides protection even as it causes others to target them.
It is also worth noting that the book makes some parallels between the children’s experiences and Jewish people’s experiences during the war, as Abe was also Jewish and escaped the Nazis in Poland. Before Jacob recognizes that his grandfather’s tales about the children are true, Jacob thinks that the children were all Jewish and that the monsters chasing them were not hollowgast but Nazis. He states, “The peculiarity for which they'd been hunted was simply their Jewishness. […] What made them amazing wasn't that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chambers was miracle enough.” This parallel further reinforces the point that differences can both paint targets on people’s backs and make them unique, providing them with the tight bond of community.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Magic, Belonging, and Protection ThemeTracker
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Quotes in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
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.
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.
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?
“But the larger world turned against us long ago. The Muslims drove us out. The Christians burned us as witches. Even the pagans of Wales and Ireland eventually decided that we were all malevolent faeries and shape-shifting ghosts.”
“So why didn’t you just—I don’t know—make your own country somewhere? Go and live by yourselves?”
“If only it had been that simple,” she said. “Peculiar traits often skip a generation, or ten. Peculiar children are not always, or even usually, born to peculiar parents, and peculiar parents do not always, or even usually bear peculiar children. Can you imagine, in a world so afraid of otherness, why this would be a danger to all peculiar-kind?”
“Because normal parents would be freaked out if their kids started to, like, throw fire?”
“Exactly, Mr. Portman. The peculiar offspring of common parents are often abused and neglected in the most horrific ways.”
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.”
Emma stood up and shut the door. “She won’t kill us,” she said, “those things will. And if they don’t, living like this might just be worse than dying. The Bird’s got us cooped up so tight we can hardly breathe, and all because she doesn’t have the spleen to face whatever’s out there!”
