Jacob Portman has a rather unusual grandfather named Abe, and according to Abe, his past was literally magical. He was born in Poland just before WWII, and had to escape the Nazis. He was sent to an island off the coast of Wales, where, as he tells his grandson, the sun shone all day and everything was perfect. And the kids there did magical things; Abe even has photographs to prove it--invisible boys and such. At first, Jake is fascinated by these tales, even though a part of them gives him nightmares--the monsters. In Abe's early stories to young Jake, horrible monsters with loose black skin and many tentacle-like tongues were what chased him away from his family and to the island off of Wales. But as Jake gets older and wiser, he figures out that Abe's stories must be embellished, and that the creepy monsters were really just men with guns and uniforms, who Abe later went to fight when WWII finally came. Only then something awful happens: Abe is murdered in the middle of the woods. Jake and his friend Ricky arrive just in time to see the old man die, and Jake sees something terrifying in the woods that runs away before he can get a proper look--it's one of the monsters Abe always told him about. But Ricky didn't catch a glimpse of the creature, and so Jake gets a psychologist named Dr. Golan who diagnoses the boy with acute stress reaction, and pronounces the "monster" in the woods a product of that, and after a while, Jake is convinced that he saw nothing. His grandpa was killed by wild animals, nothing else. But Abe's last words are still haunting him, and he cannot figure them out. On his sixteenth birthday, Jake receives a gift from his grandpa: a book of Ralph Waldo Emerson's writing, and inside there is a letter, fifteen years old, from someone named Alma Peregrine. Soon, Jake and his father plan a trip for a few weeks to the Welsh island of Cairnholm. Mr. Portman wants to research birds there, and Jake plans to figure out what really happened to his grandfather when Abe was a child, and so he finds Miss Peregrine's home for peculiar children.
On the photographs, I have already said that I enjoyed their inclusion, but there were some that I felt were unnecessary, like the "freakish ballerinas," the dude with the backmouth who was clearly not Claire, the young women with their backs to the camera (that one wasn't even explained, and since it's one of the most normal-looking ones in there, I felt like it needed a little explanation), and the girl with the double reflection. In the letter from Miss Peregrine, she talks about how not all the peculiars are still there in the loop. Well, you find out the fate of one guy, but otherwise, it seems like everyone who was at the home when Abe was still lives there, and that leaves all those cool pictures unexplained. I mean, there could've at least been a line in there somewhere like, "Oh, yeah, some of these other people whose pictures were taken left the loop, too," or something like that. Perhaps the next book will explain these random peculiars.
The other little problem I have is with the hollows. Okay, they're creepy. I get that. I would be scared if a monster with loose black skin and tentacle tongues was standing in front of me, but I felt like an element was missing. To reference Harry Potter again (and this really is sort of like a bleak and twisted Harry Potter at times), let's look at what make the scary monsters of the series--dementors--so scary. Yes, the dementors look creepy, with their long cloaks and gray hands, etc., but their appearance alone wouldn't do much to an experienced witch or wizard who'd seen many nasty things in his or her lifetime. What makes dementors so terrifying is their aura. They create a feeling of despair and depression whenever they approach, and that is why they are such good monsters. The hollows of MPHfPC have none of that. They look scary, sure, but a peculiar used to seeing some pretty bizarre things would not be all that affected by the sight of a hollow. (Or the thought of one--what really got me here was how scared teenage Jake was of them, even before he saw one. Most teenagers do not obsess over the thought of gross-looking monsters that they're pretty sure aren't real.) I felt like there was maybe a subtext that hollows have an aura of fear, but some actual words would've been nice. I can't read Riggs' mind. Even if it's ugly and scary, even if it wants to eat you, you don't go into full panic mode until there is an aura. Seeing as the next book is called The Hollow City, maybe more details will be added on the monsters of this storyline.
In short, I really did enjoy this book. I would recommend it to fans of dark fantasy, and I will hopefully get to the sequel a little quicker than I did the first book.