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Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - BOOCarz

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* * *<br />

As you can imagine, convincing my parents to let me<br />

spend part of my summer on a tiny island off the coast<br />

of Wales was no easy task. They—particularly my<br />

mother—had many compelling reasons why this was<br />

a wretched idea, including the cost, the fact that I was<br />

supposed to spend the summer with Uncle Bobby<br />

learning how to run a drug empire, and that I had no<br />

one to accompany me, since neither of my parents<br />

had any interest in going and I certainly couldn’t go<br />

alone. I had no effective rebuttals, and my reason <strong>for</strong><br />

wanting to make the trip—I think I’m supposed to—<br />

wasn’t something I could explain without sounding<br />

even crazier than they already feared I was. I certainly<br />

wasn’t going to tell my parents about Grandpa<br />

Portman’s last words or the letter or the photo—they<br />

would’ve had me committed. The only sane-sounding<br />

arguments I could come up with were things like, “I<br />

want to learn more about our family history” and the<br />

never-persuasive “Chad Kramer and Josh Bell are<br />

going to Europe this summer. Why can’t I?” I brought<br />

these up as frequently as possible without seeming<br />

desperate (even once resorting to “it’s not like you<br />

don’t have the money,” a tactic I instantly regretted),<br />

but it looked like it wasn’t going to happen.<br />

Then several things happened that helped my case<br />

enormously. First, Uncle Bobby got cold feet about my<br />

spending the summer with him—because who wants<br />

a nutcase living in their house? So my schedule was<br />

suddenly wide open. Next, my dad learned that<br />

Cairnholm Island is a super-important bird habitat,<br />

and, like, half the world’s population of some bird that<br />

gives him a total ornithology boner lives there. He<br />

started talking a lot about his hypothetical new bird<br />

book, and whenever the subject came up I did my<br />

best to encourage him and sound interested. But the

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