“When someone won't let you in, eventually you stop knocking.”

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
Philadelphia, Penn. : Quirk Books, c2011.

Jacob Portman’s grandfather believes in monsters and he believes that they are after him. After witnessing his brutal death, suddenly 16 year-old Jacob believes in them too. Fearing he has gone mad, his parents consent to him leaving for a atmospheric Welsh island, where his grandfather lived during the war after being plucked from a concentration camp, hoping that this will cure his grief. There he goes looking for Miss Peregrine and her bunch of misfits that populated his grandfather’s stories. Could there really be a boy who can reanimate the dead? Or a girl with the power of fire? A potent blend of realism and fantasy.

Home is the hunter, home from the hill, and the sailor home from the sea.

Homecoming by Cynthia Voight
New York : Atheneum, c1981
At thirteen years-old, Dicey is old enough to see that there is something wrong with her mother. Poverty and hardship have chipped away at her sanity. Her worst fears are confirmed when, en route to visit an aunt they've never met, her mother leaves her and three siblings in a car while she goes to the supermarket, and they don’t see her again. Armed with almost no money, but steely inner strength, a sharp mind and a glimmer of hope, Dicey must do what seems impossible to keep her family together and walks them across America, into the unknown.

Set in the early eighties, this book reads well as a stand-alone novel but was extended into a cycle of seven books for those who wish to keep reading.