Hollow City

Please note that this review may contain spoilers for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. You can read my review of this novel [here].

Hollow City was written by Ransom Riggs and first published in 2014. It forms the second part of the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series and follows Jacob and his friends as they travel across blitz-torn England. The novel is preceded by Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011) and followed by Library of Souls (2015) and Map of Days (2018). I would strongly recommend reading these novels in sequence if you want to have any idea what is going on.

With any hope of returning to his own time stolen, Jacob Portman now has no choice but to help his newfound friends to save Miss Peregrine. Following her injuries, their caretaker has not been able to return to her human form. It’s not long before they learn that she is now in terrible danger. Miss Peregrine can only be cured by another Ymbryne. If the children can’t find one in three days, she will lose her humanity and become a bird forever.

No longer protected by the loop, the children begin a long journey across the country in search of allies. However, they have been stranded in the 1940s and so it is not the safest time for the children to travel alone. People are suspicious of strangers and are quick to accuse those who stand out of being German spies. And at night, the bombs begin to fall.

To make matters worse, the children are still being relentlessly pursued by both Wights and Hollows. Every loop they come across seems to have already been ransacked and Jacob and his friends are forced to face the grim possibility that they are now the only ones left. Yet what can the Wights possibly be planning and where are they taking the kidnapped Ymbrynes?

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was first published in 2011 and is Ransom Rigg’s debut novel. It’s an eerie mystery about a teenage boy who sets out to discover the truth in the strange stories that his grandfather told him as a child. The novel forms the first part of a trilogy and is followed by Hollow City (2014) and Library of Souls (2015). There is also a film adaptation of the first book due for release at the end of this year.

At the age of sixteen, Jacob Portman had long come to believe that his grandfather was just senile. He was old enough now to see that the tales of a childhood spent in an orphanage full of “peculiar” children were just symbolic of his evacuation from war-torn Poland, and the monsters that chased him were just Nazi soldiers. However, Jacob suddenly realises how wrong he is when tragedy strikes and he witnesses his grandfather’s death at the hands of a hideous ghoul.

Unable to believe his eyes, Jacob suffers from nightmares and anxiety attacks. On his psychiatrist’s urging, he begins to investigate his grandfather’s past and discovers that he really did once live in an orphanage on the remote Welsh island of Cairnholm. Jacob decides to visit the island in the hope that doing so will help him confront his fears.

However, Cairnholm holds many mysteries. As Jacob explores the island and the ruins of the orphanage, he starts to unearth a secret that’s been hidden since 1940. It rapidly becomes clear that everything his grandfather told him was true. That the children were kept hidden in such a remote place for a very good reason and, impossibly, that they’re still alive.