Claire Densmore is a female peculiar with the peculiarity of having an extra mouth in the back of her head with extremely sharp teeth. She is one of Miss Peregrine's peculiar children.
She is the youngest (in terms of age before arrival to the loop) of the peculiar children.
Biography[]
Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children[]
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In Chapter 6 when Jacob is having dinner with the children, he notices that Claire hasn't eaten anything on her plate and asks her why this is so. Miss Peregrine explains that she prefers to eat alone, the other children then begin to pressuring Claire to show them why. Claire gives in and turns around in her chair, dipping her head back to the goose leg on her plate. The mouth hidden by her curls then takes a bite with its "sharped-toothed" jaws.
In Chapter 9 when Miss Avocet arrives at the home, Claire is with the other children in their pajamas outside the sitting room gossiping. She suggests that the peculiars in Miss Avocet's loop might have forgotten to reset their loop, being the first words Claire says throughout the book. When Enoch suggests that the peculiars from Miss Avocet's had been eaten, she and Olive wail. It isn't until Hugh shouts at him and sends his bees after him and Miss Peregrine emerges from the sitting room that Enoch stops.
Hollow City[]
She stays behind at Miss Wren's Menagerie with Fiona because of a flu she has caught. During the wights' attack on the menagerie, both of her mouths were gagged and she was stuffed into a sack, eventually joining her friends after their capture by wights as well. She also reveals that she is around 80 years old when she tries to refuse to stay behind at the menagerie ("I've just had eighty years of pleasantly boring days").
Library of Souls[]
It is confirmed by Addison that the menagerie had been raided by Caul's army, and Claire was captured. However, she was returned safely and without harm. Claire is seen fighting the wights with the other peculiars.
A Map of Days[]
Claire, the other children, and Miss Peregrine come to Jacob's house for a visit. She asks whether they can go exploring the next morning, and later hugs Jacob with everyone else during his small speech.
She expresses her love of pizza after trying it for the first time, wanting to eat it every night. Later, when some of the other children are beginning to question Miss Peregrine's authority, Claire angrily tells them that they are being rude and bites Enoch's shoulder with her backmouth.
While the children begin deciding to go to the beach and Olive complains that she can never take her metal boots off, Claire suggests tying her to a rock near the water.
The next morning, Jacob sees Claire, Olive and Bronwyn chasing each other around the yard. Miss Peregrine lays out more rules for the children during their stay in the present, and in contrast to her normal agreeing with Miss Peregrine on everything, Claire is significantly less enthusiastic about the new rule of not killing normals. In preparation for going to the beach, she and Olive get floppy sun hats and dark glasses as nothing else fits them. While Jacob is trying to decide how to deal with his parents, Claire suggests having them go on holiday somewhere far away.
Claire and the others wait for Miss Peregrine in the Portmans' backyard, and sudden static electricity in the air (from a pocket loop) makes her hair stand on end. She likes the pocket loop to Devil's Acre, having not been a fan of the drive to the swamp to reach Jacob's house as she gets carsick. In Devil's Acre, she is assigned to be head of lunch and dessert distribution to loop reconstruction teams in Belgium.
When the children meet Itch for the first time, Claire calls him a fish monster when he first comes up to them. Arriving back at Jacob's house late and confronted by Miss Peregrine, Claire tries to say that they didn't mean to but is cut off by Emma. The next day, Jacob takes the peculiars out modern clothes shopping again, with this time Claire being part of the first group. She and Jacob convince a scared Horace to get out of the car and come into the mall. Watching modern teenagers, she asks if they are rich, as the concept of being a teenager is foreign to her due to her original time period.
When Jacob and Emma tell everyone about the mission that H gave them, Claire reacts angrily and refuses to come along, despising the idea of going behind Miss Peregrine's back. She is the only person who does not immediately say no to Bronwyn's question of whether they should tell Miss Peregrine about the mission, but ends up being convinced not to say anything.
The Conference of the Birds[]
The Desolations of Devil's Acre[]
Graphic Novels[]
In the first graphic novel, Claire does not have many appearances and around the end of the book, when Jake and Emma have supposedly rescued "Miss Peregrine" (in reality it was Caul), she begs the peregrine falcon to change back. She later boards a boat with Horace, Fiona, and Millard.
In the Hollow City graphic novel, she starts crying when the children settle down for the night and asks to hear a story from the Tales of the Peculiar. After being told the story The Tale of Cuthbert, Claire comments that it is a terrible story while Enoch sniggers beside her. In the morning, she is being carried by Bronwyn who says that she is feverish and needs medicine. Upon reaching Miss Wren's Menagerie, Claire is seen in Fiona's arms and the children receive medicine for her. Claire was too sick to go with the others and Fiona stayed behind to look after her. Later in the story, the wights came to the menagerie and according to the book have pushed Fiona off a cliff and captured Claire.
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (film)[]
When Jacob enters the destroyed home where the peculiar children used to stay at, Claire, along with the other children is seen spying on Jacob while he was wondering around the house.
Claire is later shown playing with The Twins in the backyard of Miss Peregrine's home.
During supper time, the other children begin to eat supper, but Claire does not. When questioned why she isn't eating by Miss Peregrine, Hugh interjects saying that she is embarrassed to eat in front of Jacob. When insisted not to be embarrassed, she proceeds to eat her chicken leg with her backmouth, which surprises Jacob.
After supper, Claire and the other children watch Horace project his dreams, only to have his projection prematurely ended due to its nightmarish (and for Jacob and Emma, embarrassing) content. Afterwards, Claire and the other children go outside and watch Miss Peregrine reset the loop.
Claire is then shown being comforted by Miss Avocet, due to her fear of having to leave her loop. Later after Mr. Barron breaks into the loop with Jacob held hostage, Miss Peregrine orders Claire and the other children to enter the other room while she is being captured, this is to prevent them from all attacking Mr. Barron.
After Mr. Barron leaves with Miss Peregrine in captivity, Claire and the other children prepare for the hollowgast that is sure to come. When the hollowgast breaks into the house, Claire is evacuated by Jacob along with the other children.
After this incident, the children decided to use the sunken ship by the shore in the loop, that Emma used as a hide out in the past to get to the loop in Blackpool (this was where Mr. Barron and the other wights set up their machine to redo the experiment they did using ymbryne's essence to gain immortality, and this same experiment is what caused them to become wights and hollowgasts) Claire is seen lifting her curls to allow her backmouth to spit out a mouthful of water.
When they get to Blackpool, Claire and the Twins begin to fight a fellow wight of Mr. Barron, named Miss Edwards, along with Bronwyn, Fiona and Olive, who were fighting another wight. In the next scene, Claire and the Twins continue to dodge Miss Edwards's knife attacks, until Miss Edwards decides to try to grab Claire from behind, only for Claire chomp on Miss Edwards arm using her backmouth, In excruciating pain, Miss Edwards is then turned to stone by the twins.
When the fight with the wights and hollows were over and the ymbrynes were free, the children leave the loop in Blackpool and decide to go back into the loop Miss Peregrine created. (After the point where the Nazis dropped a bomb on the children's home, the loop was not reset, so time continued to move forward to September 4th, 1943, rather than being reset by Miss Peregrine.)
Description[]
Physical[]
Claire is described as doll-like, with a dainty baby face and fair skin. She has immaculate, long golden curls that hide the mouth on the back of her head. Like a doll, she is also very small, and is the youngest of Miss Peregrine's wards.
In the film, Claire appears as a young girl with fair skin, greyish-green eyes, and blonde Victorian ringlets that is kept in twin tails by pink ribbons on the sides of her head. She usually wears a long, pink and frilly dress with pink ribbons attached to her dress as well.
Personality[]
Claire appears to be a shy child. However, she believes in the ymbrynes very much, always taking their side, and gets angry when the other peculiars don't follow Miss Peregrine's orders. In The Desolations of Devil's Acre, when the others complain that Miss Peregrine still treats them like children, Claire says that they all still are children, and if they kept sneaking off and disobeying orders, maybe they did deserve to be treated as such. She seems to talk more after the first trilogy, and shows a bit of a snarky side to her such as when she sneers at the "mission" H gave Jacob and Emma as nothing more than delivering a package.
Claire in the movie has a shy and insecure personality, which is shown by how she very rarely talks and speaks at a soft spoken tone. Her insecurity steams from her backmouth, and she feels embarrassed to eat with it in front of new wards, as shown in her interaction with Jacob.
Peculiarity[]
Claire's peculiarity is a "backmouth", meaning she has a mouth on the back of her head. It is described as being "sharp-toothed", and is masked by her thick golden curls. It has the ability to eat, with a second throat connecting it to Claire's stomach, and has also been seen spitting water in the movie. Miss Peregrine once heard it speak in Latin while Claire was asleep, and believes that it might be connected to a second smaller brain.
Backmouth is a condition similar to diprosopus, an extremely rare congenital disorder in which parts of or an entire second face is duplicated on the head.
Relationships[]
Miss Peregrine[]
Claire looks up to Miss Peregrine as a parental figure, showing great distraught when she could not get out of her peregrine form. She also mentions that Miss Peregrine reads her the Tales of the Peculiar. Being a firm believer in the ymbrynes, Claire does not question Miss Peregrine's authority over the children and is completely against the others going behind Miss Peregrine's back.
Fiona Frauenfeld[]
Fiona stays behind at Miss Wren's menagerie to take care of the Claire. Claire was very upset when she witnessed a wight push Fiona off a cliff.
Bronwyn Bruntley[]
Claire being one of the little ones, Bronwyn acts like an older sister or even like a mother towards her.
Trivia[]
- Claire is the youngest of Miss Peregrine's peculiar children (not counting Jacob).
- The name "Clair" (spelled without the "e") is traditionally a name given to a males and was a popular name in the United Kingdom during the 1970s-80s. Based on this information, it's possible that the photograph "Claire's Golden Curls" is actually of a boy.
- Claire's peculiarity is the same as the Japanese yōkai Futakuchi-Onna, a woman with an extra mouth on the back of her head beneath her hair. In-universe, it's likely that peculiars like her inspired this legend.
- Claire loves pizza.