Having defeated the monstrous threat that nearly destroyed the peculiar world, Jacob Portman is back where his story began, in Florida. Except now Miss Peregrine, Emma, and their peculiar friends are with him, and doing their best to blend in. But carefree days of beach visits and normalling lessons are soon interrupted by a discovery—a subterranean bunker that belonged to Jacob’s grandfather, Abe.

Clues to Abe’s double-life as a peculiar operative start to emerge, secrets long hidden in plain sight. And Jacob begins to learn about the dangerous legacy he has inherited—truths that were part of him long before he walked into Miss Peregrine’s time loop.

Now, the stakes are higher than ever as Jacob and his friends are thrust into the untamed landscape of American peculiardom—a world with few ymbrynes, or rules—that none of them understand.

—

The fourth book of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children starts off exactly where the third one ended. Jacob is in Florida and his peculiar friends visit him and bring him back into the world he thought he dreamt up.

Jacob truly has grown since book one, and in this book, we see more of his independence and need to be seen a Jacob instead of Abe’s grandson. Diving back into Ransom Riggs world was like coming home and discovering that there was a hidden door I missed.

Map of Days is a character-driven story, compared to a plot-driven story of its predecessor. Here we see our favorite characters evolve and truly grow up. After pretty much saving the world, the children begin questioning the authority of the ymbrynes after they giving merger tasks in the rebuilding of the peculiardom. Their growth and rebellion were organic — as characters like Emma, Millard, Enoch, and Bronwyn question their identity and their role in life beyond being Miss Peregrine’s wards. Most importantly we see Jacob trying to find out who he is while trying to live up to Abe’s name; while trying to figure out what exactly his grandfather did.

The plot dragged on a bit too much for my personal liking, as Mr. Riggs tries to give us a bit of a crash course of everything that happened in the previous books in the most organic way possible. It was also a bit too dialogue heavy for my liking (I have a certain style of writing I prefer reading), but it did not harm the story in any way.

In Map of Days, the gang is in America and Mr. Riggs created a brand new world that felt nothing like the peculiardom in Europe. In America, everything is different: the politics, the rules, the loops, and the world. Also, the new characters introduced the story held the same spark and shine and the peculiar children. No one was overshadowed, even though some characters weren’t in this particular book as much as the previous ones.

I was very pleased with how the developing of everyone’s personalities. But the development of Emma and Jacob’s relationship filled me up with happiness (I don’t want to spoil anything)!

I look forward to seeing where Jacob’s story will take us next.