Analysis Of Ransom Riggs's Hollow City

Time, to normal people moves in a straight line, on the one end, is the past forever unreachable, and unchangeable to mortal beings. The past at some point becomes the present, where all mortal beings, and everything else that exists currently resides, and on the far end of this line, there is the future, shrouded in a mist, which mortals can only vaguely predict. In contrast to what normal humans see, the peculiar children, and haunting monsters of the novel Hollow City experience both time and place quite differently. For these peculiar children in Ransom Riggs novel the past is accessible through magical loops in time, where days are repeated exponentially, these loops provide to be an essential and interesting element of the story, effectively

The setting in Riggs’s Hollow City changes frequently, both in aspects of time and place, thus enriching the conflict by providing new obstacles for the protagonist to overcome. Jacob Portman’s journey begins when his grandfather is killed by a mysterious monster which only he can see. This leads him on an incredible adventure that takes him to a cold, and dreary island

This change in setting is not a change in place but rather in time, from the year 1940 to present time to be exact. Riggs describes the shock that comes with this time change on page 389 “The circular staircase we’d come down was gone, too, replaced by an escalator. A scrolling LED screen hung above the platform: TIME TO NEXT TRAIN 2 MINUTES. On the wall was a poster for a movie I’d seen earlier in the summer before my grandpa died. We’d left 1940 behind. I was back in the present” many of the main characters in the novel have never experienced time past 1940, so to travel to a world that is more than fifty years in the future poses many challenges one of which would just be adjusting to new technology and way of life. The main characters are left to deal with this stressful new environment, and have to learn to adapt very quickly because, this change in setting occurs at the climax of the book where some of the most unforgiving changes in plot