The Second Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children Trilogy Is Spoiled By Bad Plotting

A few years ago I read the first three books in the Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series.  I even wrote an article comparing the first book and the movie, which strangely was made as a one-off with no real attempt to make it a franchise.  For the most part I liked the first three books.

Eventually I got the next three books on sale and so started to read these.  To set it up, the series is about a kid in Florida named Jacob who finds out that his grandpa was a "peculiar," which is sort of like a mutant in X-Men.  His grandpa's power was he could see and control evil monsters called "hollows" that no one else could see.  Jacob soon finds he has this power when he goes to Wales and finds a "time loop" where the titular Miss Peregrine and her peculiar children are living.  

Jacob falls in love with Emma, a teenage girl with fire powers.  She was also his grandpa's girlfriend until he left the time loop to have a normal life while she stayed and so never got any older than sixteen.

Then the loop is destroyed by Miss Peregrine's evil brother Caul and she's kidnapped (or birdnapped) and Jacob and Emma and the rest have to flee and go save her.  But except for Jacob the others can only stay outside time loops a very short time or they'll suddenly age rapidly until they pretty much turn to dust.  They go to various loops and ultimately a place called the "Library of Souls" where the souls of ancient peculiars are kept and Caul wants to use to make himself a god and take over the world.  Jacob and company stop him and in the process Emma and the other peculiar kids get their clocks reset so they will now age normally.

After Caul is defeated, Jacob goes home and starts wondering if it's all a dream...until Miss Peregrine, Emma, and everyone else shows up in Florida.

So the fourth book starts off with the fallout of this.  Miss Peregrine has to put Jacob's parents to sleep and then wipe their memories.  The parents then are implanted with a suggestion to go on a vacation to Asia for a long time--something I already did in the first Scarlet Knight book back in 2009.  Eat it, Ransom Riggs!  So this way we don't have to worry about the parents anymore.

Then some lip service is given to showing these kids from 1940 the modern world and getting them modern clothes.  About then the first book is almost half over and there doesn't really seem like a plot.  But then it finally starts in earnest when Jacob and Emma find his grandpa's secret lair and undertake a mission to go to New York to find a new peculiar girl.

The trip of course is not simple as they run across some highwaymen and take a detour back into 1960s America, which becomes awkward when they pick up a black kid and he can't go into diners because they're segregated.  Eventually they get back to the present and find an Indian (from Bombay) girl named Noor who has a weird power where she can swallow light to create darkness and then barf it back up or some shit like that.

There are people with black SUVs and helicopters and stuff who chase them and then they get captured by a creepy kid who turns victims into dolls and sells the ones she doesn't want into slavery.  Only with Miss Peregrine's help can Jacob and most of the others get free--except Noor, who remains captive.  So then he goes back to rescue her.

This fourth book was really poorly paced with things really slow in the first two-thirds and then hitting overdrive at the end.  But what really irked me starting with this book is the way the author sidelines Emma.  It's kind of like one of those sitcom things where something happens to sabotage her relationship with Jacob to set him up with someone else.  In this case Jacob finds out Emma called his grandpa when they were in the 60s.  They didn't see each other or kiss or anything, but still he takes this as a sign she's not over his grandpa and so they break up.

Which frees Jacob up to go after Noor in the next book.  And then Emma is relegated to a secondary character and really not given much to do the rest of the series.  I really didn't like it because it was so obvious what the author was doing.  Really I think there were a couple of factors here:

1. The relationship between Emma and Jacob was always a little creepy with her essentially being old enough to be his grandma.
2. Since this was not an erotica book, there was really nowhere for their relationship to go after they professed their love and made out.  And being only 16, they weren't going to get married or have babies.
3. And also Emma is just an ordinary white girl and there's not a ton of diversity in the original group of peculiars.

So maybe for those reasons (and others) Emma has to do something to poison her relationship with Jacob.  Then he can get together with Noor, who's the same age as him (literally), is a fresh relationship, and a person of color for added diversity.

It always bugs me when you can see behind the curtain to the author pulling levers and turning wheels to make the story work a certain way.  It takes me out of the story itself.

Besides that, there were a couple of retcons that made me think of the crappy Star Wars sequels.  

Something else that happens in the fifth book is all those dudes with black SUVs and helicopters and stuff chasing Noor turn out to be "wights," the bad guys from the first three books.  Which seemed like a retcon after someone mentioned in the fourth book there was a secret society of normal humans chasing after peculiars.  But, um, nope that's not really a thing now.  I guess the author decided that was going to make the plot too complicated, or else he decided to do something different.  Still, it was some Rise of Skywalker shit.

In the fifth book it's mentioned that Noor is part of "the Seven" who are prophesized to prevent an apocalyptic war and stop Caul.  Fast-forward to the last book and then it says that all of these Seven are like Noor.  OK, fine.  Pretty unoriginal, but whatever.

And then when we find out four of the Seven are dead, well, you only actually need one; the other six are just spares.  What?  So why did they even need to bother going through a hellish World War I loop to find these others when they didn't even need them?  And the two they do find get killed by Caul anyway because Mary Sue Noor has to be the one to defeat him on her own.  It was another really obvious retcon, like the author couldn't think of six other neat Peculiars so he just changed them all to the same thing.  And then he didn't want to juggle six new characters so he just used two and said the rest didn't matter.

Something else that was Star Wars like was the fourth book didn't really set up a new villain of note.  There were just those random highwaymen and bad guys with SUVs and helicopters and then the evil Peculiars near the end.  So then just like the Star Wars movies it goes back to the villain of the original trilogy.  But to Riggs's credit, at least he established in book 5 that they were trying to free Caul from his prison.  He didn't just start book 6 saying, "Hey, Caul's back!"  I mean, that would be about the stupidest thing ever, right?

Stuff like that really ruined this second trilogy of books.  With the messy plotting, I start wondering if this was just a cash grab because the first three books were pretty successful.  And maybe the author didn't have anything else going on.  So just throw together some more books in this successful series.

Like someone ranted about Second Chance, I call betrayal!  Betrayal!  Because with Miss Peregrine and the kids coming to Florida you'd think they would stay there and join the modern world, but nope.  Most of them are in another time loop called "Devil's Acre" in Victorian-era London most of the time.  And you have to think those sort of MIB-type guys would have tied into a plot about the conflict between peculiars and normals in the modern world...but nah, let's just get back to wights and Caul and all that.  Why try anything new?  Which again is like the Star Wars sequels, only instead of Rian Johnson fucking it up the author kind of fucked things up himself.  Or maybe his editors fucked it up.

And in the end everything pretty much goes back to where it was at the very start, except Jacob and Noor are in Miss Peregrine's old house with the other kids.  So what was the freaking point?  They're in practically the same loop and while Caul is defeated, most everyone is just doing what they were doing before.  I'm sure people considered that a happy ending, but it made it all kind of pointless.

Anyway, it just didn't work as well.  So you definitely don't need to read those three books.