74 pages • 2 hours read
Ransom RiggsMiss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Jacob meets his dad back at the pub, where his dad is working on his laptop. His dad asks about the house, and Jacob tells him that it is trashed and that no one has lived there in a while. His dad confesses that he used to be interested in Abraham, but after some time, he wasn’t interested anymore. Jacob’s dad explains that Abraham wasn’t much of a father—he was always away on trips. One story, accompanied by a picture, demonstrates the abandonment Jacob’s father felt. One Halloween, Jacob’s dad, dressed as a bunny, was ready to go trick-or-treating. He waited for Abraham and Abraham never showed up. He confides: “I never dug too deep with your grandpa because I was afraid of what I’d find.” One reason for this fear was his dad and grandmother’s suspicion of the existence of another woman who motivated Abraham to leave the house so often.
Jacob balks at the accusation, and his dad accuses him of worshipping Abraham. Jacob can’t imagine his grandfather being anything but honorable, so he rushes out of the pub: “I slammed out of the Priest Hole and started walking, heading nowhere in particular. Sometimes you just need to go through a door.” He heads to the island’s museum and approaches a case containing what he initially thinks is a monster. Instead, inside the case is a shrunken body. The curator, Martin, approaches Jacob and explains that it is the body of a 16-year-old boy that was found in a bog on the island and is 2700 years old. The islanders call the body, the “old man.” Martin explains that the boy’s people believed bogs “were entrances to the world of the gods.”
Jacob asks about the children’s home, and Martin explains that the house was bombed during the Second World War. Martin offers to bring Jacob to his Uncle Oggie, who lived on the island during the war and would know more about the bombing. Oggie tells a story about the bombings, which happened on September 3, 1940. Jacob realizes this was one of the clues his grandfather gave when he died. Oggie tells Jacob that one person survived, and Jacob understands the survivor to be his grandfather.
Jacob has difficulty falling asleep that night as he again begins to wonder if the trip and his grandfather’s story are pointless. When he wakes up from a fitful sleep, he sees a bird watching him, which then flies out the window. His dad examines a feather and says it belongs to a peregrine falcon. The incident revives Jacob’s desire to continue pursuing his grandfather’s story out of fear of regret.
Chapter 5 Summary
Jacob goes to the children’s house the next day in the pouring rain. After looking around the ground floor and not finding anything, he decides he has to go upstairs or downstairs next. He chooses to go upstairs first, which he finds is “like a time capsule.” He rams his shoulders against a set of heavy doors to open them. Behind the doors is a room that reminds him of something from Sleeping Beauty’s castle. He believes it to have been Miss Peregrine’s room. After entering the room, he begins to feel as if he is being watched.
He thinks that the next room he finds was Abraham’s. Overcome with emotion, he lies on the bed and cries, wondering if his grandfather had nightmares like him. He considers the hardships his great-grandparents faced and continues to cry until he notices a trunk under another bed. He attempts to break the lock on the trunk to no avail and decides to push it off the landing. Once he pushes it over the landing, it crashes through the floor below and into the basement. He can see photographs fluttering on the floor and heads into the dark basement.
The basement contains jars filled with organs, but Jacob continues on. At first, the pictures appear ordinary, but the more he examines them, the more they remind him of the pictures his grandfather used to share with him. He studies them, but has trouble figuring out if the pictures are real or not. Above him, a crash sounds and he hears voices. He tries his best to remain quiet, but accidently makes noise. A girl’s voice calls out, asking if it was Abe that made the noise. Through the hole in the floor above him, he can see a dozen children that look like the ones in the photos.
Once the children realize Jacob is not Abe, they run away. Jacob runs after them and chases the girl who called out Abe’s name into the trees around the house. He loses her in a bog, but follows her footprints to a cairn, which marks a tunnel. He enters the tunnel, but can’t find the girl and starts to think he imagined all the children. Out of frustration, he decides to go home and leaves the tunnel. Instead of the fog and rain he had been running through, he is greeted by sunshine.
Once in town, he sees carts being towed by animals and realizes that the diesel engines are missing. He goes to the Priest Hole, but finds that Kev is not there. Another man attending the bar questions Jacob when he tries to go up to his room. The men in the bar accuse him of being an American and a spy. Jacob runs away. In an alley, he is grabbed from behind and held at knifepoint by the girl he had been chasing. She demands that he show her his eyes. He tries to prove who he is by giving her Miss Peregrine’s letter, and he finds out it is September 1940.
Believing him to be a wight, the girl ties him up in a house. After waking up from a faint, he meets an invisible boy named Millard Nullings and learns the girl’s name is Emma. When Nazi planes fly overhead, Millard and Emma take Jacob out of the house where they are hidden and run to the Priest Hole. Emma shows off that she has fire powers. They go into the priest hold in the floor, and Jacob notices Emma and Millard keep mentioning a “loop,” another clue from his grandfather’s last words. They move through the tunnel beneath the pub until Emma pulls away a tarpaulin to reveal blue sky.
Chapter 6 Summary
Emma and Millard take Jacob to the children’s home, which is no longer in shambles. From a window inside, he watches a levitating girl and some boys in the yard while he and Millard wait for the headmistress. Miss Peregrine has been expecting him and is annoyed that Emma tied his hands. She questions why it took him so many days on the island to come visit. He explains that he didn’t know where they were. He tells Miss Peregrine that he was looking for them in the wrecked house and that he didn’t realize they were all dead.
She asks Jacob when he realized Abraham was telling the truth, and he replies, “I guess I’m just realizing it now.” He tells Miss Peregrine how Abraham died, and she wonders aloud why he let himself grow old. She then explains that she and the children are syndrigast, peculiar spirits, and that peculiar traits skip generations, so people need a safe haven. Miss Peregrine takes the form of a bird because birds can time travel and manipulate time. She further explains that she created the temporal loop they are speaking in. Each day, the loop has to be reset like clockwork.
After the explanations, Miss Peregrine invites Jacob to dinner and he accepts. Jacob asks two final questions, wondering if his grandfather was running from the Nazis. Miss Peregrine replies that he was. Jacob’s last question is whether his grandfather was like them. Miss Peregrine says, “He was like you, Jacob.”
At dinner, he meets many different peculiar children. When the air-raid siren goes off, he worries that the house is going to be blown up, but the children explain to him that it is a changeover, and they ask Miss Peregrine if they can show him. Tracer bullets abound in the sky, creating colors. Instead of being terrified, the children think it is beautiful. After the bomb goes off in blinding white light, Jacob asks if he can go home for the night. Miss Peregrine says he can and asks for a volunteer to take him home. Emma volunteers.
Emma loved Abraham, and as she and Jacob walk back to the tunnel, she throws her arms around him and they cry together. Back at the pub, Jacob finds his dad asleep in front of his laptop. His dad asks where he has been and what he has been doing. Worried about Jacob, his father calls Dr. Golan and gets Jacob to talk to him. Dr. Golan jokes that he should come out to check on Jacob. Instead, Dr. Golan tells Jacob to do his own thing and sort things out himself.
Chapters 4 – 6 Analysis
In these chapters, the reader learns more about Jacob’s father as well as some of the peculiar children Abraham once knew and loved. As in the earlier chapters, the reader continues to watch Jacob struggle with whether or not he wants to pursue or believe his grandfather’s story.
The rollercoaster ride of belief and nonbelief began with Jacob’s dad, who confesses in these chapters that he used to be interested in Abraham, but lost interest because Abraham wasn’t much of a father and Jacob’s dad suspected that there was another woman on the side. Whereas Jacob’s dad gave up on the story, Jacob continues the pursuit. He does not want the regret of not at least following the story until the end. The difference between Jacob and his father is further highlighted when Miss Peregrine tells Jacob that he is like Abraham, something that cannot be said for Jacob’s father.
Jacob enters a situation unlike anything he has ever known when he crosses into the loop and meets the children Abraham cared for so much. Not only is it a time unlike his own, but he is also surrounded by people who are interested in him (as opposed to at home, where he has only one friend). The new interactions, especially with Emma, signify a change in Jacob from someone who questioned who he was and where he came from to someone who is confident in what he knows and understands of the world and his family.
In chapters 4 and 5, the reader witnesses a lot of violence—from Jacob “slamming” out of the Priest Hole to Jacob pushing the trunk off the landing in the overgrown children’s home. Considering Jacob’s dad described Abraham as forceful, the violence and breaking signify an important change relating again to Jacob’s own evolution as a character. He breaks down the barriers keeping him from understanding his grandfather’s story, which then allows him to enter the cairn and the world his grandfather cared about and wanted to share with him.
Finally, collections, as a motif, become more important than ever. In the earlier chapters, the collected works of Emerson hold the key to Jacob going to Cairnholm, which then leads him to the collections of artifacts on the island. In turn, the collections lead him back to the children’s home to find a collection of photographs. Ultimately, he finds his way through the loop to a “collection” of peculiar children, hidden away from the outside world. Collections are meant to contain, and each collection Jacob encounters contains a clue, a piece of the mystery of his grandfather’s story. Each is like a plot point in a story, driving the plot forward to an ultimate denouement, which has yet to occur.
Related Titles
By Ransom Riggs
