Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

by

Ransom Riggs

The Home Symbol Analysis

The Home Symbol Icon

Miss Peregrine’s home symbolizes the conflict between protection of the peculiar children (especially from outside threats) and excessive restriction. Initially, when Jacob arrives at Miss Peregrine’s home (in the 1940s) and sees all the children playing, he views it as a “paradise.” The home is a haven for the kids, allowing them to hide from the wights and hollowgast, as well as from prejudiced ordinary people. Jacob finds the home’s atmosphere freeing and begins spending more and more time there.

However, over time, Jacob comes to see how restrictive the home is, noting that the children have endless time but can do little of importance—particularly because the time loop around the home prevents them from aging. One boy, Victor, even decided to leave the home because he was “going mad,” and as a result, he was killed by the wights. While this vindicates Miss Peregrine’s concern and demonstrates the home’s necessity, it also shows how the home’s restrictions are so harsh that they can backfire. Miss Avocet’s arrival only exacerbates this conflict, because her warning about an impending wight attack prompts Miss Peregrine to put the children on extreme lockdown inside the home. The children grow restless, with Emma stating that “living [cooped up] like this might just be worse than dying.” The situation suggests that the house’s protection is helpful to a point, until it becomes too restrictive, effectively trapping the kids.

The book’s conclusion reinforces this idea that the house, while idyllic, is also “a prison.” Without Miss Peregrine to reset the time loop, a German bomb strikes the home, and the children are forced to set out in search of another ymbryne. While losing the house has cost them a measure of protection, the children feel freer at the same time, and as a result, “they felt more vital, more real.” The ending suggests that losing protection is sometimes worth it to gain freedom.

The Home Quotes in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Home. 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:

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 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

“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 6 Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Miss Alma Peregrine (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 154
Explanation and Analysis:

Then it was my turn. I was sixteen, I told them. I saw a few kids’ eyes widen. Olive laughed in surprise. It was strange to them that I should be so young, but what was strange to me was how young they seemed. I knew plenty of eighty-year-olds in Florida, and these kids acted nothing like them. It was as if the constance of their lives here, the unvarying days—this perpetual deathless summer—had arrested their emotions as well as their bodies, sealing them in their youth like Peter Pan and his Lost Boys.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Olive
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 170
Explanation and Analysis:

Falling asleep, my thoughts drifted to the peculiar children and the first question they’d asked after Miss Peregrine had introduced me: Is Jacob going to stay with us? At the time I’d thought, Of course not. But why not? If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Miss Alma Peregrine
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 181
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:

Some years ago, around the turn of the last century, a splinter faction emerged among our people—a coterie of disaffected peculiars with dangerous ideas. They believed they had discovered a method by which the function of time loops could be perverted to confer upon the user a kind of immortality; not merely the suspension of aging, but the reversal of it. They spoke of eternal youth enjoyed outside the confines of loops, of jumping back and forth from future to past with impunity, suffering none of the ill effects that have always prevented such recklessness—in other words, of mastering time without being mastered by death.

Related Characters: Miss Alma Peregrine (speaker), Jacob Portman
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 258-259
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

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!”

Related Characters: Emma Bloom/The Girl (speaker), Jacob Portman, Miss Alma Peregrine, Miss Avocet
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 282
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

I decided I was done lying. “I’m fine, Dad. I was with my friends. “

It was like I’d pulled the pin on a grenade.

“YOUR FRIENDS ARE IMAGINARY!” he shouted. He came toward me, his face turning red. “I wish your mother and I had never let that crackpot therapist talk us into bringing you out here, because it has been an unmitigated disaster. You just lied to me for the last time! Now get in your room and start packing. We’re on the next ferry!” […]

I wondered for a moment if I would have to run from him. I pictured my dad holding me down, calling for help, loading me onto the ferry with my arms locked in a straightjacket.

“I’m not coming with you,” I said.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Jacob’s Dad (speaker), Emma Bloom/The Girl, Dr. Golan/The Birder, Jacob’s Mom, Millard Nullings, Olive
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 344
Explanation and Analysis:

We were quiet but excited. The children hadn’t slept, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at them. It was September fourth, and for the first time in a very long time, the days were moving again. Some of them claimed they could feel the difference; the air in their lungs was fuller, the race of blood through their veins faster. They felt more vital, more real.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Miss Alma Peregrine
Related Symbols: The Home
Page Number: 351
Explanation and Analysis:

In the next boat, I saw Bronwyn wave and raise Miss Peregrine’s camera to her eye. I smiled back. We’d brought none of the old photo albums with us; maybe this would be the first picture in a brand new one. It was strange to think that one day I might have my own stack of yellowed photos to show skeptical grandchildren—and my own fantastic stories to share.

Then Bronwyn lowered the camera and raised her arm, pointing at something beyond us. In the distance, black against the rising sun, a silent procession of battleships punctuated the horizon.

We rowed faster.

Related Characters: Jacob Portman (speaker), Miss Alma Peregrine, Bronwyn, Miss Avocet
Related Symbols: Pictures, The Home
Page Number: 352
Explanation and Analysis:
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The Home Symbol Timeline in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The timeline below shows where the symbol The Home appears in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Prologue
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
At seven years old, Jacob starts to question his grandfather about the children’s home, asking why the monsters wanted to hurt them. Jacob’s grandfather explains that they were “peculiar”—one... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
The children’s home, by contrast, felt like a magical paradise to Jacob’s grandfather. The children didn’t really have... (full context)
Chapter 2
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Truth vs. Deception Theme Icon
...old. Jacob thinks if Miss Peregrine was around 25 when she was running a children’s home in 1939, she’d be in her late 90s now—so it’s possible she could still be... (full context)
Chapter 3
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Jacob’s dad then asks the curator about the old children’s home, but the man doesn’t quite know what they’re talking about. He says he might know... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
...and discuss their plan: they’ll go birdwatching first, then set out to find the children’s home. They walk away from the town as the fog clears, and Jacob sees how beautiful... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
...or years. Jacob struggles past the bog, and suddenly the trees part—he can see the house clearly atop a hill. While his grandfather always described the house as a cheerful place,... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
...missing walls, and he doesn’t know how to reconcile this with the image of the house his grandfather painted. It is impossible that anyone could still be living there, and he... (full context)
Chapter 4
Truth vs. Deception Theme Icon
After leaving the house, Jacob scrambles his way back through the woods and bog. He sees when he returns... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Jacob then asks about the people that lived in the children’s home, and Martin explains that no one has lived there since World War II. Cairnholm had... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
...rocking in an easy chair in his living room. Oggie says he remembers the children’s home—the kids who lived there were “odd.” They weren’t regular orphan children, and many of them... (full context)
Family Theme Icon
...Jacob concludes that he owes it to himself to make one more trip to the house, a lot of which he didn’t explore. He hopes that he might find a photo... (full context)
Chapter 5
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
...in the town, but the dense fog still lingers on the path to the children’s home. Jacob trudges once more through the mud and rain; he wonders as he passes the... (full context)
Family Theme Icon
...his family’s deaths—Jacob starts to cry. He thinks about the children who died in the house because a pilot simply pushed a button. Jacob thinks about how this affected his own... (full context)
Truth vs. Deception Theme Icon
...came from this same trunk. It means that the photos really had come from the house, but Jacob still wonders whether the fantastic stories could actually be true. Suddenly, there’s a... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
...wonders if he’s losing his mind. He ducks into an alley, where he finds an outhouse to hide in while he collects himself. But when he emerges, someone grabs him by... (full context)
Chapter 6
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
...next to a girl who makes fire and an invisible boy. Soon, they reach the house, and Jacob sees it in pristine condition—it’s a beautiful sight now that it’s not destroyed.... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Inside the house, everything is in order: it’s cheerful and comfortable, with nice furniture and curious faces peeking... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Family Theme Icon
Emma returns and pulls Jacob further into the house into a sitting room, where Miss Peregrine waits. She is dressed all in black with... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
Then, Miss Peregrine asks what Jacob was searching for in the house. When he explains, she realizes how little his grandfather told him about his old friends.... (full context)
Truth vs. Deception Theme Icon
...frustrated, knowing how deeply the news would upset Emma—she and Abe were sweethearts at the home. Jacob realizes that this is why Emma didn’t want to believe that Jacob was Abe’s... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Truth vs. Deception Theme Icon
...clothes—Jacob is still wearing the borrowed suspenders. Jacob explains that he was just exploring the house and put on these old clothes that he found. Jacob’s dad grows concerned, explaining that... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
...quietly that Jacob will go birding with him tomorrow instead of going back to the house, and Jacob refuses. At this, Jacob’s dad goes downstairs to the pub. (full context)
Chapter 7
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Family Theme Icon
...path. Jacob grows excited, knowing the day is full of possibility. When they reach the house, Jacob sees that the kids have put up a small wooden stage with a curtain... (full context)
Truth vs. Deception Theme Icon
...very angry sheep farmers are questioning Worm. Jacob says he’s been alone in the old house on the other side of the island. Jacob’s dad questions him about the friends he... (full context)
Chapter 8
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
...it crumbles in his hand. Confused, Jacob goes to the cairn and arrives at the house, where Miss Peregrine pulls him aside before he sees anyone. She scolds him for talking... (full context)
Chapter 9
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Running back to the house, Hugh explains that one of Miss Peregrine’s fellow ymbrynes flew to the house, terrified, and... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
Truth vs. Deception Theme Icon
...to remain calm and to be on watch, explaining that they can travel beyond the house only with her permission. She insists that Jacob spend the night, and he agrees only... (full context)
Chapter 10
Family Theme Icon
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
...time avoiding him. Meanwhile, at Miss Peregrine’s, the children are essentially locked down in the house, with rotating sentries keeping watch. The kids start to go a little wild, being cooped... (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
...children theorize why the hollows are trying to capture ymbrynes. But being confined to the house makes them apathetic and unhappy. One night, Jacob experiences Horace’s peculiar talent for the first... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
...store him in ice at the fishmonger’s. Jacob has to get back to the children’s home, so he fakes being sick, locks his room, and slips out the window and down... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Family Theme Icon
Miss Peregrine makes an announcement, explaining that no one can leave the house for any reason. When Jacob protests that he needs to return to the town, Miss... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Family Theme Icon
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
...doesn’t want to sit around and wait for the wights to show up at the home. (full context)
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
Family Theme Icon
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
After dinner, when the house is most chaotic, Jacob and Emma sneak out of the attic and onto the roof,... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
...turn back, but she seems unable to turn back into a human. Returning to the house, they hope that after some time to rest, Miss Peregrine and the loop will go... (full context)
Chapter 11
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
When the children reach the house, they see that a bomb has completely destroyed it; small fires burn everywhere. Miss Peregrine... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Magic, Belonging, and Protection Theme Icon
...help them fix their loop, and gradually the others agree. They decide to abandon the house, scavenging a few medical supplies to help Millard and a peculiar atlas to help them... (full context)
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
...cairn, saying goodbye to their loop. They bury Victor sadly and say goodbye to the house, taking just a few things that they can carry. They venture into the village, where... (full context)
Coming of Age and Self-Confidence Theme Icon
Mortality and Meaning Theme Icon
...how extraordinary his life was. Now, it’s impossible to return to, just like the children’s home. The kids, along with Miss Peregrine in bird form, set out in three rowboats, and... (full context)