My Selection — Ms Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Selected quotes and reflections

Book Title: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children Author: Ransom Riggs

I had finished this piece of young adult fiction at the end of March 30, 2020. the last piece of young adult fiction I’d read was probably almost a decade prior, roughly in 2011. The reason?

The pandemic had just struck locally and I was stressed. I was distressed. My way to cope was to finally use the library card that I had to listen to audiobooks, and this one was the first one.

I wanted something that was new, instead of rereading something old, because I needed it to be engaging enough that I could drown out some more anxious thoughts. So I turned to fantasy.

And in this book, I found an entire world beyond my own, filled with the oddest twists and turns, I couldn’t even begin to imagine on my own.

Here are some of my favourite quotes from the piece!

“We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high.”

This quote comes up not only in this book, but in its essence, repeats itself in numerous other children’s and young adults’ stories. I’d forgotten.

The last time I’d encountered this concept of youth and creativity and believing genuinely not only in fantasy but in the good of the world, I was on the other side of the equation. It was unfathomable to me to ever become an adult with a boring life.

Yet that’s precisely who I became. I became someone who revelled in numbers, in routines and habits for chores, in tracking numerically my budget, eating, and mood. It’s so intriguing that there was once a time I thought all of this would be the end of me, the end of experiencing creativity and fantasy by “growing up”.

I clung to different fairytales when I was younger, but rather than scoffing and teasing at my younger self for doing so, I realize and reflect that I still do. The stories themselves are different, but I still cling to a different kind of fairytale.

And perhaps that is a cycle that keeps happening throughout our human lives.

“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around — they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.”

These words really spoke to me, the way it highlights that perhaps the scariest things in life are not the things that rot and show flesh and bone, but the ones who blend in day to day as normal and accepted.

As a kid I wondered about something quite similar. We were taught to be afraid of ghosts through these horror stories, but were ghosts not humans once? The extent to which ghosts are scary reflects only a magnifying of what humans are when they were alive.

“Their memory was something tangible and heavy, and I would carry it with me.”

This is perhaps my favourite quote of them all, but maybe less relatable to a general reader. For some reason, I have always been enamoured by the concept of memories. I loved collecting things, but more than ever, I loved to collect memories.

I learned about memory palaces so that I could keep, almost hoard, every experience that had ever happened to me, archiving it somewhere in my mind.

Whenever I read something where memory is spoken about with some kind of analogy, I get really excited, and this is quite the same.

What are your thoughts? Would you dabble in some young adult fiction to escape some of the world’s harsh realities right now? I highly recommend the experience!