Fiona

Fiona is one of Miss Peregrine’s peculiar children, distinguished by her ability to make plants grow and by a striking contrast between her habitual silence and her urgent actions in a crisis. Introduced onstage raising flowers from soil, she later helps the children escape the house, brings news that Millard has followed their enemy, and uses her gift to cover Victor’s grave with new growth.

Identity and Introduction

Fiona appears during a performance by the children. Emma identifies her by name as she takes the stage behind a planter filled with dirt. As the orchestra plays “Flight of the Bumblebee,” Fiona raises her hands and concentrates; daisies emerge from the soil and open toward them. The flowers seem to be drawn upward by invisible strings, making her ability legible to the audience as an act of growth directed by her gestures.

The performance presents a practiced talent, not a one-off surprise: the children cheer, and Emma explains that Fiona also grows the vegetables in the garden beds, as well as bushes and flowers. She can sometimes grow trees, extending her peculiar ability from small blooms to much larger plants. Her control of living growth gives her a place in the home’s everyday cultivation as well as in its staged displays.

Appearance and Presentation

Fiona’s wild hair and quiet manner shape how others introduce her. Emma describes the costume made for Fiona’s postcard as a deliberately natural, “savage-type” look, nicknamed “Jill of the Jungle.” Fiona is from Ireland, not a jungle; the playful mismatch between the costume’s imagined setting and her actual origin underscores that the performance is an interpretation of her connection to nature rather than a literal account of her background.

Her silence is especially noticeable against the bustle of the other children. During the performance, she works without speaking, while Hugh joins her to release bees that pollinate the flowers she has grown. Much later, Hugh says he has never heard Fiona utter even a peep. The contrast gives her eventual shout for help particular force: when she speaks, it is because the situation requires immediate action.

Ability and Practical Role

Fiona’s plant-growing is shown as both controlled and useful. Onstage, her concentration accompanies the daisies’ emergence and unfolding; outside the performance, her cultivation supplies the garden’s flowers, bushes, vegetables, and sometimes trees. The ability links spectacle with domestic labor: what delights the audience also sustains the household’s living surroundings.

The book does not describe a complete set of limits or rules for her gift. It does, however, show it in circumstances beyond the stage. During the children’s final preparations to leave, Fiona draws shrubs and vines over the earth of Victor’s grave and makes them grow. Her power can therefore alter the landscape as well as produce a display, and it becomes part of the group’s response to loss.

Crisis and Action

When the children leave the house during the storm, Fiona helps make their escape possible. Olive floats down from the roof on a rope, with Fiona holding it from a window. The arrangement makes Fiona a participant in the group’s coordinated exit, even though she remains out of the spotlight. The children’s retreat from the house is not simply a matter of individual ability: it depends on practical assistance passed from one child to another.

Later, while the group is arguing about what to do as the danger continues, Fiona calls from the path. Hugh recognizes her, and the children run toward her through the noise of aircraft and distant explosions. Hoarse from shouting, shaken, and intent on getting them to town, she pulls and pushes them along the path. Once Hugh asks her to slow down, she explains that Millard had been hidden when the man shut the others in the basement and had followed him when he left. Her short report changes the group’s understanding of the danger: Millard is not with the rest of them, but may be pursuing the man alone, and the man has a boat.

This is a marked departure from Fiona’s usual silence. She does not become a frequent speaker; rather, the crisis makes her communicate what the group urgently needs to know. Her warning supplies information and direction at a moment when noise and uncertainty could otherwise delay their response.

The House’s Destruction and Victor’s Grave

After the children return, they find that the bomb has destroyed part of the house and that the familiar loop has failed to reset. The group is exhausted and in shock as it confronts the damage and prepares to leave. Fiona is among them on the journey away from the ruined home: Miss Peregrine rides on the nestlike crown of Fiona’s hair while Bronwyn carries the injured Millard.

The children bury Victor in the crater left by the bomb. When they have finished filling it, Fiona pulls shrubs and vines over the raw soil and makes them grow. The resulting cover changes the crater into a planted grave, and by the time the children finish packing, the bomb-damaged marker known as Adam stands over Victor’s resting place. Fiona’s act does not undo the death or repair the house; it makes growth part of the group’s farewell, a practical and carefully chosen response to the ground the destruction has left behind.

Narrative Role

Fiona is characterized less through explanation than through demonstrations of what she does: the flowers she raises, the garden she tends, the rope she holds, the warning she delivers, and the vegetation she grows over Victor’s grave. Those actions connect her peculiar ability to the children’s shared life rather than isolating it as a mere spectacle.

The contrast between her long silence and her urgent speech also shapes her role in the group. Fiona’s warning has concrete consequences because it reveals Millard’s pursuit and sends the children toward town; her work at Victor’s grave gives the departing group a final act of care amid the wreckage. Across both scenes, her quietness is not passivity. When words or growth are needed, she acts.