They manage to get Miss Peregrine back from the wights, though she is stuck in her bird form. At the end of the first novel, Miss Peregrine’s loop has been destroyed by wights, Miss Peregrine is trapped in her bird form and captured by the wights, the loop is destroyed, and the kids are on the run. Jacob’s grandfather lived with the kids in Miss Peregrine’s loop when he was a boy, so they accept him quickly. Miss Peregrine’s loop is in 1940, but as we learn in Hollow City, there are lots of loops in many different times.

A time loop is just what it says, a constantly recycling loop of time. The protectors are called ymbrynes-peculiar women who can manipulate time and take the form of birds. Groups of peculiar children are sequestered with protectors in time loops. Turns out that most peculiars live in time loops to stay safe from the evil people of peculiardom, called wights, who are out to kill all “good” peculiars, especially the children. He travels from Florida to an island off the coast of Wales with his father-I don’t remember why they go there-and ends up finding a school out in the woods filled with strange children and their teacher, Miss Peregrine. The primary protagonist is Jacob, a sixteen-year-old boy, who knows nothing of peculiardom until his grandfather is killed by a monster (which we later learn is called a hollowgast, or hollow) that only he and Jacob can see.

The author, Ransom Riggs, is a collector of old, bizarre pictures, and he uses them to craft his stories about these “peculiar” people, which is what he calls mutants or supes or witches. If anyone knows anything about the first book in this series, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, that person knows that it’s full of weird pictures. But then I remember that it’s been fully a month since I wrote anything for the blog and I feel really guilty about that. Summarizing book one is complicated by the following: I read it in 2012 and I own a copy, but it is currently in circulation so I can’t reference it. Mostly it’s because it’s the second book in either a trilogy or a series, and I haven’t felt like figuring out how much time to devote to summary of the first book what I thought was going to be a trilogy, but now I’m not so sure, based on some of the things I just read on Amazon. Not because I didn’t enjoy it, because I did. I’ll admit that I’ve been putting off writing my review of Hollow City.

Hollow city novel