"Miss Pergrine's Home for Peculiar Children" Ransom Riggs

"I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but life never was ordinary.  I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.  Likewise, I never imagined that home would be something I would miss.  Yet as we stood loading our boats in the breaking dawn, on a brand new precipice of Before & After, I thought of everything I was about to leave behind...and I realized that leaving wouldn't be like I had imagined, like casting off a weight.  Their memory was something tangible and heavy, and I would carry it with me.  And yet my old life was as impossible to return to as the children's bombed house.  The doors had been blown off out cages."