This review contains spoilers, but wrapping it all in tags isn't working. Don't read further if you don't want to be spoiled.

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children is a frustrating book. It starts strong and the mystery hooked me early, but the more answers Riggs delivers the more annoyed I became. It's a book that relies heavily on an internal logic that only makes sense if you choose not to look at it too closely. The second you inspect it it all falls apart, and I spent the back half of the novel growing increasingly annoyed and wanting the book to end.

The central conceit is that so-called "peculiars" - people with magical abilities, essentially - are being hunted by powerful creatures called hollows. Hollows are the remnants of peculiars who, at the dawn of the 20th century, took part in a "hateful experiment" designed to harness the nature of time loops (more on this shortly) in order to extend their lives and achieve immortality at least and, at best, some form of deification. The experiment went wrong, creating a catastrophe that wrecked the local area and transformed the peculiars into the monsters now known as the hollowgast. 

The hollows hunt the peculiars and their guardians, bird women called ymbrynes, who have the ability to open up time loops. They use these loops in order to hide the peculiars in their charge from their hunters. The hollows can't enter time loops themselves, but they're aided by humanoid creatures called wights who can enter the loops. The end goal of the hollows is to capture ymbrynes and peculiars for reasons that are only ever speculated at.

Follow all of that? Okay. Good.

Here's where it gets frustrating. The concept of time loops is central to the story, but the novel can't quite decide what they are or how they work. What we do know for sure is that they're localised to specific areas and kept open by the ymbrynes, and that people who live inside them don't age unless they leave the loop, at which point all the time they spent inside it catches up with them. Miss Peregrine built her school for peculiar children on the site of a time loop, where they lived happily for a decade or so until the blitz arrived and a bomb destroyed the house and threatened the lives of the peculiar children living in it. Rather than having all of her charges killed, Miss Peregrine opened the time loop and hid her children inside it. Since then, the peculiars and Miss Peregrine have lived inside the loop while decades pass outside.

This is provided as an explanation for why the children and Miss Peregrine don't leave their loop. The assumption is that they didn't need the loop for protection before the war, because it was the war that caused a rise in the hollows. Later, though, we find out that the hollows use wights to hunt peculiars - and that wights can enter loops. Not only can they enter them, wights are "notoriously adept at leapfrogging", which is the act of traveling "from one loop to another", giving you "access to a whole range of loops". Additionally "the locations of historical loops are well known to our enemies, who tend to lurk near the entrances".

We can, I suppose, assume that the presence of Miss Peregrine inside the loop keeps it active and stops it becoming an "historical" loop, which explains why the wights couldn't simply leapfrog inside. But it doesn't explain why they had to spend years tracking Jake and following him across continents to find the island, when they could have just camped outside the entrance to the loop. Or rather, it makes sense earlier in the novel when we're told that Miss Peregrine created the loop to protect the children from the falling bombs and we don't fully understand that all these loops already existed and aren't created by ymbrynes out of nothing. But it doesn't make any sense by the end of the novel when it's revealed that this loop has been used in 1580, 1797, and 1853. Presumably the wights know it's here, and have known for a long time.

Jake's only purpose in the novel, really, is to lead the wights to Miss Peregrine and her peculiars. He literally only goes to the island in the first place because his psychiatrist - a wight who has disguised himself and been stalking Jake for years - tells him to. He only wants to go there in the first place because the same wight killed his grandfather, who used to live in Miss Peregrine's time loop. All of the events that take place in the novel are caused by the actions of this wight exerting its influence on Jake - which would be fine, if the wights didn't know where Miss Peregrine was hiding and needed some way to find her. But, as established, they do know where she is. So they never needed Jake in the first place.

That's my biggest frustration with the novel, and unfortunately it's one that I can't get past because the whole book revolves around it. I have other minor frustrations, such as the fact that the peculiars are treated like children throughout the book and allow Miss Peregrine to treat them that way, despite all being 80 years old or more. They are very much adults trapped in child-like bodies, but the book only acknowledges that once or twice and doesn't actually do anything with it. They still behave like kids, they still act like kids, they still take lessons from Miss Peregrine (what can she possibly still be teaching them after 80 years? At some point she has to accept that they know as much or more than her about plenty of things, because they are adults). Never mind the weird romance angle, where an 80 year old woman decides to enter a romantic relationship with the 16 year old grandson of her former love. It's addressed briefly by Jake, who wonders if it's weird or if it could even be considered a bit incestuous, but then it's never brought up again. And it should be brought up again, because it's weird.

Ultimately this just wasn't for me. I won't be seeking out the sequels and I wouldn't recommend it.