Losing Home and Letting Go

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Other items were so precious that the children clung to them even as they rowed. Fiona kept a pot of wormy garden dirt pressed between her knees. Millard had striped his face with a handful of bomb-pulverized brick dust, an odd gesture that seemed part mourning ritual. If what they kept and clung to seemed strange, part of me sympathized: it was all they had left of their home. Just because they knew it was lost didn’t mean they knew how to let it go.

-Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Complicated Emotion

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“How are you?” she asked. It was a question that would’ve required some college-level math and about an hour of discussion to answer. I felt a hundred conflicting things, the great bulk of which canceled out to equal cold and tired and not particularly interested in talking. So I said, “I’m fine, just trying to dry off,” and flapped the front of my soggy sweater to demonstrate.

Hollow City: The Second Novel in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Clumsy Inspector of Shadows

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Walking down to the water’s edge, I tried to picture myself the way my new friends saw me, or wanted to: not as Jacob, the kid who once broke his ankle running after an ice cream truck, or who reluctantly and at the behest of his dad tried and failed three times to get onto his school’s noncompetitive track team, but as Jacob, inspector of shadows, miraculous interpreter of squirmy gut feelings, seer and slayer of real and actual monsters—and all that might stand between life and death for our merry band of peculiars. How could I ever live up to my grandfather’s legacy?

Hollow City: The Second Novel in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Brash Confidence

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I’d never met anyone with Emma’s brash confidence. Everything about her exuded it: the way she carried herself, with shoulders thrown back; the hard set of her teeth when she made up her mind about something; the way she ended every sentence with a declarative period, never a question mark. It was infectious and I loved it, and I had to fight a sudden urge to kiss her, right there in front of everyone.

Hugh coughed, and bees tumbled out of his mouth to form a question mark that shivered in the air. “How can you be so bloody sure?” he asked.

Because I am, that’s all.” And she brushed her hands as if that were that.

Hollow City: The Second Novel in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Change Memory and Fog

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…a silent goodbye, to a place that had changed me forever—and the place that, more than any graveyard, would forever contain the memory, and the mystery, of my grandfather. They were linked inextricably, he and that island, and I wondered, now that both were gone, if I would ever really understand what had happened to me: what I had become; was becoming. I had come to the island to solve my grandfather’s mystery, and in doing so I had discovered my own. Watching Cairnholm disappear felt like watching the only remaining key to that mystery sink beneath the dark waves. And then the island was simply gone, swallowed up by a mountain of fog.

Hollow City: The Second Novel in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Never What I Believed or Imagined

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I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was. Likewise, I never imagined that home might be something I would miss. Yet as we stood loading our boats in the breaking dawn, on a brand new precipice of Before and After, I thought of everything I was about to leave behind—my parents, my town, my once-best-and-only friend—and I realized that leaving wouldn’t be like I had imagined, like casting off a weight. Their memory was something tangible and heavy, and I would carry it with me.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

The Movie opens TODAY!

Mysteries of Heaven and Earth

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I didn’t go far, just around the perimeter of the neat yard in a slow shuffle, watching the sky, clear now, a billion stars spread across it. Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize that we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries—but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

The Movie opens TODAY!

Chramingly Headstrong

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“At times, young man, you tread a precariously thin line between being charmingly headstrong and insufferably pigheaded.”

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

The Movie opens September 30th!

True Taxonomy of Homo Sapiens

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“The composition of the human species is infinitely more diverse than most humans suspect,” she began. “The real taxonomy of Homo sapiens is a secret known to only a few, of whom you will now be one. At base, it is a simple dichotomy: there are the coerlfolc, the teeming mass of common people who make up humanity’s great bulk, and there is the hidden branch—the crypto-sapiens, if you will—who are called syndrigast, or “peculiar spirit” in the venerable language of my ancestors. As you have no doubt surmised, we here are of the latter type.”

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

The Movie opens September 30th!

Just Need A Door

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I slammed out of the Priest Hole and started walking, heading nowhere in particular. Sometimes you just need to go through a door.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

The Movie opens September 30th!