But then Jacob witnesses his grandfather’s murder–ostensibly by a half-human beast–and discovers that the photos might not have been fakes at all. Because he was Jewish, Abe Portman was hunted by the Nazis. And because he was born with special powers (in the book’s parlance, “peculiars“), he was hunted by ghostlike beings.
This is a potentially dangerous story to tell–it’s hard to get away with writing an analogy for genocide, especially in a young-adult book. But Peregrine handles both its subjects–peculiars and survivors–respectfully, creating something that’s less a metaphor than a fully-thought-out, spellbinding, suspenseful story about both.