Hollow City

The adventures of Jacob and his peculiar friends continues. After surviving their sea voyage, the children must work together to cure Miss Peregrine who has become trapped in bird form. In order to turn back, she needs the help of one of her ymbryn sisters. Unfortunately, all the loops have been raided and it is believed that all the ymbrynes have been captured. The children decide to journey to London and attempt to enter a punishment loop to free one. They must hurry because if Miss Peregrine stays as a bird for too long, it will become impossible to turn her back.

Along the way they will meet gypsies, talking animals, and run from bombs during the Blitz. But if they can manage to befriend the various Peculiars they meet and evade the show more Wights long enough, they might even survive. The book culminates in a tense face-off in the bowels of an ice fortress. Pretty exciting.

I have to admit, this book's premise is not aging well. I guess I really don't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to keep children with supernatural powers completely isolated from the rest of the world and forever trapped in their adolescent bodies. It's pretty sick. And I don't understand why any of them put up with it for decades. Sure it keeps them safe, but it also keeps them weak. Meanwhile, an entire group of people is hunting them down in order to literally consume them. And the ultimate plan is just to hide... forever? What kind of life is that? And no combat training or self-defense for emergencies? What's the point of having supernatural powers if you never learn to use them?

When they finally meet Mrs. Wren she unceremoniously tells them that they are very brave little children and now they will be safe once again in her impenetrable ice fortress. She says this to an eighty year old woman trapped in the body of a teenage girl who has just had her (perhaps) first experience of adult freedom. I don't know a single teenager who would tolerate being referred to as a child, much less one that is actually an octogenarian that can burn people alive with her bare hands.

And then comes the bizarre scene where they all grab icicles and take hostages. I'm sorry, they all have super powers, they are under siege, and the only weapons they have at hand are icicles?? These people are doomed to die. Of course they are all immediately taken captive by the Wights and Hollows. It becomes blindingly clear how ALL the loops were raided with barely any resistance. They are pathetically unprepared. show less

Sooo I finally finished the book. And ladies and gentlemen, please, PLEASE excuse the next sentence.
Because WHAT IN THE FUCKITY FUCK JUST HAPPENED IN THE ENDING??! Holy shit, this book is full of surprises! I'm not ashamed to say that the scene towards the end had me gasping, complete in dramatic hand-over-mouth fashion. There were just so many surprises all in that last chapter, that upon finishing the book, I immediately pre-ordered the next one. I had originally thought that if this second book ended in some closure like I thought it would, I wouldn't buy the third book and just leave it at that (not because I doubted that it'd be a good read; rather, because my purse had been rather sad lately).
But nooooooo. The book was amazing; show more way better than the first, although I had liked that one too. Can't wait for the third book to launch and continue to sink my teeth into peculiardom again. show less

I think I liked this one better than the first. Now that the world has been set and the characters have been introduced, the story picks up pace and the plot becomes more complicated. I liked the character development shown in Jacob, Bronwyn, Hugh and Millard. Emma and Enoch are still a bit hard to like albeit for vastly different reasons. I guess Emma is the sort of person you like having in your group of friends but when she is shown in a relationship she's a bit manipulative. I don't like the way she treats her boyfriend sometimes. With Enoch I have yet to find a redeeming quality. It's hard to tell if he is the way he is because of circumstances (and if he could ever be different) or if he's already lost some essential human traits. show more Either way I am invested in these people and curious about book #3. show less

In the second installment of the Miss Peregrine series, Riggs expands his peculiarverse to include talking animals, a carnival sideshow and a traveling band of gypsies. Unlike its predecessor which was weighed down by a long exposition, Hollow slams the gas pedal right away straight into a fast paced adventure plot. Like an Indiana Jones movie, Ms. P's gang maneuvers one close call after another as they travel through WWII-ravaged London to find the one person capable of releasing their leader from the bird-form she shifted to at the end of the previous novel. While I enjoyed the book, several aspects seem forced. The inclusion of found photos often feels inorganic. It also feels like peculiar folklore, often brought to us by Millard, a show more scholar of all things peculiar, is relied on heavily to explain minor plot holes. Still, the sequel is welcomed, and the adventure element is an excellent addition. Throughout the story, each peculiar child gets a chance to save the gang with their own unique power, like Olive's ability to float, Emma's fiery fingers, and protagonist Jacob's still developing talents for spotting monsters. For readers who don't mind suspending a fair amount of disbelief, Hollow City is very good yarn! show less

Having barely escaped the bombs that fell on their home, plus a pursuit by wights and hollowgasts, the peculiar children and Miss Peregrine, who's stuck in bird form, are making their way to the mainland from the island that had housed their loop. After a few detours and narrow escapes, they arrive in London, hoping to find another ymbryne who can help Miss Peregrine, while the German bombs are falling (it is 1940, after all).

Taking up the thread right where the first volume ended, it is essential that reader is at least halfway familiar with the characters and events in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, as otherwise the majority of the novel will make little sense.

I have to admit that it took me a while to warm to this show more sequel, and in my opinion the first few chapters dragged, which is crazy when one considers what the children had just experienced and were still experiencing. Unlike the first volume, where the photographs seemed to support the narrative, here I had the feeling that the photographs were dictating the storyline to some degree, at least in the early chapters. Once the plot had moved to London, I felt that the tension was ratcheted up another notch, with the children arriving in the middle of the Blitz, while having to fulfil their urgent mission. There is a very neat plot twist towards the end which I wager will take everyone by surprise. The author still doesn't provide the readers with a lot of answers (if anything, more questions are raised), but because the events take place over the course of only a few days, and because the plot is entirely focused on this particular group of peculiars, we get to know each individual character quite well. The narrative ends with yet another tense cliffhanger, and I will definitely read the third (and final?) book in the series to know how it all ends.

The novel was marked down because of its substantial lengths in the first part, and because it contains a big logical flaw, as well as one or two smaller inconsistencies, which should have been picked up prior to publication. show less

As readers get to know the peculiar children a bit more in this book, it becomes more and more apparent that there's not much to distinguish one from another besides their peculiar abilities. About a quarter of the way into the book, the author himself mixes up two characters (Horace = top hat, Hugh = bees, not the other way around) showing that perhaps there's not much difference to him, either. Moreover, none of the editors caught this mistake. If neither the author nor the editors care, why should I?

Against all odds, I continued reading this novel, and I actually ended up finishing it, mostly because it was a really quick read, but of course there were more irritations to come, mostly gnat-sized, but some that really bugged me. show more Among the gnat-sized was a misquoting of Shakespeare---it's "once more unto the breach," not "into." Just a minor irritation, although it does come from a major, very famous, oft-quoted speech. It was even in a movie.

More mosquito-sized are the two times that men made lewd comments/advances towards Emma. The second time really annoyed me because rather than standing up for their friend after the comment, "All of a sudden everyone was looking off at the paintings on the walls or adjusting their collars," instead of telling the perv off or even giving him a dirty look. Dude didn't have a gun or anything. He was just a dude. These are eighty-year-old children who face down death on a regular basis, and they can't call out sexual harassment when it happens to their friend? What cowards---and completely out-of-character cowards. If the author doesn't see anything wrong with this---which it seems like he doesn't---then I'm angry with him, too. This mistreating of a female character as though she's just an object is bad enough, but it doesn't even move the plot or character development forward, so it really just seems gratuitous, which makes it that much uglier.

The big, hairy tarantula of this book is the time travel. According to the rules of the world, someone from an older period of time going into a future period of time will age forward to their chronological age in the later time. So why doesn't anyone have concerns about going forward in time? And even more annoying: why on earth are these children still child-like? They're 80+ years old. Sure, they've not matured physically, but wouldn't they mature emotionally or intellectually? They've had decades to read, study, learn, expand their minds, yet they're still completely, totally children, and they're fine letting the ymbrynes continue to treat them like children. I just don't buy it. It makes me a lot more sympathetic to the wights.

But the biggest, creepiest bug of all (probably a tarantula hawk, a wasp that I know about thanks to my friend's eight-year-old) is not knowing why I read this book in the first place. After I finished the first in the series, I didn't feel compelled to read the second, but then I saw it while my kids and I were browsing the YA section at the library and here we all are. So, I'd like to be all dramatic and proclaim that I refuse to read any more books in this series and then flounce out of the room swinging my parasol, but chances are I'll end up reading the third book and then be angry with the authors, the characters, and myself all over again. show less

Book 1: whimsical and slightly eerie tale of magical children, some action and danger but little violence or suffering.
Book 2: Slaughtered animals, physical and mental torture, and the sexual assault of minor, all before the halfway point!

Whoa buddy, maybe give a warning before you jump into the deep end? I mean, I know more than one person whose childhood made that sudden lurch, but I think we all agree that it's not desirable or enjoyable. A couple of other key points: by 2014 you really should know better than to use a harmful old stereotype and derogatory term for any group of actual people. The bad guys have german accents just to make us think of nazis - this is the invocation of the holocaust only to give your story urgency and show more drama it didn't have before, and that's unforgivable (no matter how many times authors do it). Oh and bonus points for describing in detail how the torturer feels up a teenage girl in order to intimidate and humiliate her, but then drawing the line of outrage for all parties at a kiss. You made that sexual assault all about her would-be boyfriend's feels. Good job.

I mean also this is a filler-book plot-line with zero character depth, a grating screaming audio narrator, and an overall sloppy, recycled feeling. Not a fan. show less