A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)

by Ransom Riggs

I felt an unwelcome twinge of jealousy—then was embarrassed for it. She was entitled to her past, and had every right to feel as unmoored by the collision of our worlds as I did.

What struck me more than their costumes was the dignity with which they carried themselves, in spite of their circumstances. They had come seeking refuge from damaged and destroyed loops. They had lost their homes, seen friends and loved ones killed before their eyes, suffered unimaginable traumas. But there were no shocked and vacant stares. No one dressed in rags. Each one of them had had a giant hole blown through their lives, but the street pulsed with determined energy. Perhaps they simply did not have time to mourn. But I preferred to believe that, for the first time in nearly a century, peculiars could do more than just hide in their loops and hope. The worst had come to pass. Having survived it, there was much to do: They had a world to remake. And they could make it better.

“I thought I’d never understand boys,” said Bronwyn, shaking her head. “But now I think I’ve got it. They’re all idiots!”

They came from a time before the concept of teenager-hood even existed. That was an invention of the postwar years, before which you had been either a child or an adult.