Noor Pradesh is a female peculiar from Brooklyn who can absorb and release light. She is the deuteragonist of the second trilogy and one of the prophesied seven peculiars that are to emancipate peculiardom from Caul.
Biography[]
Early Life[]
Noor was born in Bombay, India, where she was saved from an attack that killed her parents. Her powers were active at birth, but an experimental serum was used on her to lock her powers away until her teen years. She was placed with a woman named Velyana (V) who raised her in her early years, and they moved around often. At one home in the eastern United States, Noor would play in a river, and there was an elm tree in the yard with a swing, which she fell from once and twisted her ankle. In the woods, Noor and V picked wild apples in the fall, and Noor would also play in a briar patch, which she ended up developing itchy red bumps from. Afterwards, they did not play in the woods as often, as V said they were dangerous. A downy woodpecker living at the edge of the yard sometimes came to sit on Noor's windowsill.
When she was five and a half, they were attacked by a pair of wights and she thought Velyana was killed. In reality, V survived, but had to put Noor in foster care to hide her further. Noor was checked up on by Abraham Portman under his alias Gandy, who she thought was with foster care.[1]
Pre-AMOD[]
Noor resided in a foster home, attended J. Edgar Hoover High School, and did after school activities for college. One day her peculiarity manifested again when her foster father demanded she get a job to earn money. She went to her room and her foster father still yelled at her through the door, upsetting her further and further. When she went to yell back, the lights in the room brightened and then broke.
A few days later, she was accepted into Bard College's accelerated arts program for high school students, and planned on getting a job to pay for it. Her foster father wanted the money to go the household bills and began yelling at her again, following her to El Taco Junior as she ran away. He ended up waiting outside after Lilly yelled at him, but Noor, still upset, went to the bathroom, where the lights began flickering and she discovered that she could hold light.
For over a year she hid it from others at school by hiding in empty classrooms or bathrooms to release light whenever she was angry, only letting her friend Lilly know. One day she noticed that some new faculty members suddenly appeared one day and she had a feeling they were there to find her. One day during an assembly, the principal was talking about the results of her outbursts. Noor overheard a girl assume it was her and, with the pressure from the assembly, accidentally broke all the lightbulbs in the room out of anger. She then absorbed all the light and fled, chased by the fake faculty who saw her and realized what she was. They cornered her in the bathroom and she released the light right in their faces, burning them. After that she fled to an abandoned warehouse.[2]
A Map of Days[]
Weeks after the incident in the auditorium, Lilly introduced her to Jacob Portman and his friends. She is reluctant at first but begins to trust them as they explain peculiardom to her. However soon after they are approached by men in a helicopter and they flee. They make it out as Noor blinds the attackers. They flee but Bronwyn Bruntley is hurt. As they rush her to the hospital they smell their favorite foods and stop at a continental restaurant. They are greeted by a woman named Beatrice who gives them food and takes them all, except Lilly, upstairs. They meet Frankie who takes control of them and puts them up for auction for clan leaders. She and the others wake up tied to chairs. Just as the auction starts, Emma Bloom tackles Frankie, freeing the others from her control. Noor absorbs the light from the stage. When Jacob lets slip she is uncontacted, Wreck Donovan alerts Leo Burnham and the group is quickly taken to him. After the ymbrynes free the others, she is left because the ymbrynes do not want to upset the clans even further.
Later Noor is freed by H and Horatio and taken to his apartment. While she is unconscious, H tells Jacob she is one of seven prophesied peculiars who are destined to bring peculiardom to a new age. She wakes up after H dies and releases the light she had in her after seeing Horatio transform. She agrees to go with Jacob after they are spotted by Leo’s men.
The Conference of the Birds[]
Noor and Jacob hide in a Chinatown seafood market, with Noor temporarily hiding them in darkness. Before Leo's men can leave, however, she gets the urge to sneeze, and in the end cannot hold it in. She ends up sneezing all the light she had swallowed in one of the men's faces, which simply stuns him for a moment. Noor and Jacob end up taking the man down, and Bronwyn and Hugh arrive to take them back to Devil's Acre.
In Devil's Acre, she becomes a bit overwhelmed at the information Bronwyn, Hugh, and Jacob start telling her, so they continue walking. At Jacob's friends' new house, she briefly hides herself in darkness again while Jacob reunites with his other friends before getting introduced to them. She also gets introduced to Miss Peregrine, who asks Bronwyn and Emma to help Noor get settled, but Noor insists on being in on Miss Peregrine and Jacob's private conversation on what happened. Noor later thanks everyone.
She and Jacob wash up before everyone settles down for dinner, where Noor gets asked about her normal life, then demonstrates her peculiarity with a candle. At bedtime, she and Jacob talk briefly, during which she hugs him. The next morning, she goes along with Jacob and his friends to see Miss Blackbird, who recognizes her.
After Jacob and Miss Blackbird's private talk, Noor, sitting on Bronwyn's shoulders, waves to Jacob from the crowd of peculiars. After Jacob tells his friends about his assignment of hunting down the escaped wights, she insists that she can handle her problem of looking for V by herself, but Enoch embarrasses her. The peculiars still decide to look for the location of V's loop in the meantime. Noor and Jacob both get hit by Itch's Fever Ditch mud, which forces them to go take showers. On the boat ride on the trip to a safe house with showers outside of the Acre, Noor shows fascination over the normals in the loop and the boatman's knowledge of what happens next. She starts humming a nursery rhyme that V taught her when she was young.
A meeting with Miss Avocet is secured about the prophecy that Noor is in, where she, Jacob and the rest of their friends learn more about it and its origins. Noor also learns more about her past, why she grew up in America, and that V was never killed like she remembered. Millard asks her for memories on where she and V used to live, but Noor finds that she has hazy memories, and Francesca thinks that Noor could have been memory wiped. Because of this, Reggie Breedlove is summoned to restore a bit. She becomes a bit tired after the experience, but refuses to rest, so she goes with everyone else to the Mapping Department to search maps.
Noor and Jacob have another talk about going through Panloopticon doors and running away, and another one later where Jacob tells her his story, and they have the conversation about their lives for hours into the night. The next day, before Jacob, Emma and Enoch leave to help Miss Peregrine, Noor worries for him and Jacob kisses the top of her head.
Through Hugh, she later sends him the light of a sunset in a box.
When Jacob, Emma and Enoch return, she comes to meet Jacob in Bentham's attic, where the pair kiss in front of everyone. A minute later, due to Horace bringing it up, she tells Jacob that she, Horace and Millard had the breakthrough of narrowing down the possible location for V's loop to just two states, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Jacob and his friends, minus Millard, go to the Shrunken Head, where Noor sits beside Jacob. She and Millard make Jacob, Emma and Enoch tell them what happened before sharing their own news.
In Bentham's secret office, she expresses doubt that Bentham's formula for escaping a collapsed loop would work, until she is told that he is a specialist when it comes to loop science. When Miss Peregrine reads the first line of the formula in Latin, both Noor and Jacob do not understand and need a translation. She is the first to ask what the Well of Hope is after the group tentatively waits to hear bad news that the fifth ingredient of the formula is in the hands of the wights like all the ones previously.
She understands Jacob's plan to break into the Marrowbone loop before he says it, and agrees with everyone else (minus Olive and Claire) to help him. While the group is sneaking through the darkness to Bentham's house, she uses a dot of light to find Jacob.
Just before the peculiars' mission to head to Hopewell, Noor tells Jacob that she will not stay behind and that the whole ordeal affects her just as much as it does everyone else, putting off finding V for later. On an SUV on the highway, she sits with Jacob and Millard on the bench in the middle row. While bending some light between her fingers, she says that Caul clearly knew about the prophecy and he probably assumed it was his fate to get trapped in a collapsed loop.
She and Jacob are the first to go into the Hopewell loop, and get locked in. They venture into a house and meet a boy who brings them to Josep. They try to convince him to let in their friends, but Josep first has a conversation with them and tells them to dispose of the current hollow in the loop.
Noor refuses to let Jacob handle the hollow on his own. Outside, she starts humming again, this time telling Jacob that it's a song that V taught her. When the hollow gets a hold on Jacob, Noor helps him by distracting and annoying the hollow with unnatural darkness. From inside, she continuously taunts it, and one of the deadriser's bodies gets in as well and stabs the hollow, allowing Jacob a chance to get into its mind. Their friends get let into the loop, and before they split up in confronting the wights Noor tells them to try not to get shot and gets hugged by Olive. Noor then gets grouped with Jacob, Hugh and Bronwyn. When Hugh gets sidetracked, following a trail of dog roses to a mind controlled Fiona, Noor follows with the others and gets caught in Fiona's vines. She has a hot ball of light in her throat, however, which Jacob indicates for her to shoot at the ambrosia addict controlling Fiona. This briefly makes the vines loosen, but only Jacob manages to escape. Luckily, Jacob takes control of the wights' second hollow and kills the addict, freeing Noor, Bronwyn and Hugh completely.
Back at Devil's Acre, Noor recognizes two of the wights they had caught; the vice principals who had been stalking her. She, Jacob and Millard go back to dedicating their time to finding V. During a break, Noor admits to Jacob that maybe she doesn't feel entirely ready to see V again. The two decide to go pick up some of Noor's things from New York now that she is living with the peculiars. They also talk about the possibility of living partly in the peculiar world and partly in the normal one.
When they arrive, they find a postcard supposedly sent by V asking Noor to come visit, and they go directly in Noor's foster sister's car. Noor and Jacob manage to cross into the loop, and find that there are two tornadoes ravaging it. They manage to survive when they realize that the song that Noor hums, the one that V taught her, actually tells them the way to get to V's house alive. However, Murnau follows them, and when he shoots V Noor tries to attack him, but unsuccessfully. He sleep darts Noor and Jacob and handcuffs them to the porch railings outside, before taking V's heart and leaving the other two in the collapsing loop.
The Desolations of Devil's Acre[]
Description[]
Physical Appearance[]
Noor is a tall Indian teenage girl with sharp features, jet-black hair that frames her face, and wide-set eyes flashing with intensity. She wears a wind breaker and jeans. When she has light inside her, she glows. Jacob says that she has a very pretty face. In Devil's Acre she changes into a simple white henley shirt and blue jeans, with hair brushed and shining. She has a moon-shaped birthmark behind her right ear.
Personality[]
Noor is a smart, hardworking teenager. After her peculiarity manifested, she became frightened and untrusting of others, aside from Lilly. She also has a dark sense of humor, as shown when she laughs when Enoch O'Connor resurrects a dead pigeon.[2] Noor is brave in the face of danger, able to be calm even when she doesn't know what is going on,[3] and things that panic Jacob, such as the presence of a hollow, tend to focus her.[4] While thinking about the things that he loves about her, Jacob has described her as always being honest with him, and guileless without being naive.
Peculiarity[]
Noor is a phosphagist light-shaper, or a light-eater: she is able to absorb light and store it in her body, and can take in light as strong as sunlight or as weak a phone’s flashlight. When she absorbs light it shines through her skin and even her clothes. She can also release the stored light as an attack, which has varied in strength; sometimes it only blinds or stuns briefly, another time its temperature was enough to be burning.
Relationships[]
Jacob Portman[]
When Noor first meets Jacob and his friends, she finds it difficult to believe what they are saying about the peculiar world, and is reluctant to go with them.[2] However, after Jacob takes over from H in rescuing her from Leo Burnham, she takes his hand despite telling him she doesn't trust him.[5] In the process of the ensuing escape from New York, Noor warms up to him. They have a connection over both thinking they were normal and suddenly being thrust into the peculiar world, and Jacob is relieved that she seems to show wonder over peculiar things, rather than revulsion.[6] The first night she arrives in Devil's Acre, she hugs him, and Jacob feels "something small but powerful turn in [his] chest."[7] Despite his dislike of the fame he has in Devil's Acre, he did hope that Noor would find him impressive. When he tells her about his old life, he finds it nice that they are connecting over the same feelings when they entered peculiardom, and it makes him feel less alone.[8]
They deeply care about each other's safety, with Noor being the first one to bring up that they're not letting Jacob go alone after Miss Peregrine asks for him to come to America to deal with a situation that involves a hollow. Jacob, in turn, is glad that Noor is not the one coming along, as he dislikes the idea of voluntarily bringing her near a hollow. They first display their feelings out in the open before Jacob leaves when she hugs and tells him to take care of himself, that she needs him in one piece, and Jacob kisses her on the top of her head.[9] Before going to Hopewell and possibly confronting the wights, Jacob tries to tell Noor that she doesn't have to come and risk her life as well, but she shuts this down and they agree that they are a team.[10]
When Jacob finds the time to think about her, he realizes that his feelings toward Noor are more chemical and visceral than with Emma, as well as tender. He often thinks about how Noor must be feeling, being so new to the peculiar world, and whether she is okay. On Jacob's return to Devil's Acre, Noor expresses great relief, and he greets her by kissing her. With this, they become a couple, or at least having "crossed a line of no return, rushing headlong into new territory. Past friendship."[11] While on their way to attempt to break into the Marrowbone loop, he feels dazed when she holds his hand, despite holding hands with a girl never being memorable before in his limited experience. It makes him lose his grip on everything else, but he wants to hold on forever.[10] He can picture her face and feel 10 to 20 percent less stressed, and imagining being close to her and kissing her turns his tension into desire.
V[]
V was the closest thing Noor had to a mother, and once she learned V was alive, it was very important for Noor to find her again. V did not want to get too attached to Noor, but couldn't help it even though she knew she would have to let Noor go one day. She taught Noor a nursery rhyme song that could lead her through V's loop out of hope they could reunite one day or in grave emergencies. V says she shouldn't have taught Noor the song, calling it a sentimental mistake, though she deeply did want to see Noor again.
Lilly[]
Lilly is Noor's only friend from the normal world, and Noor cares deeply for Lilly's safety.
Trivia[]
- "Noor" is an Arabic name meaning light.
- Noor is the first peculiar character to be born in the modern day to appear in a book since Jacob Portman at the start of the series.
- Noor is one of the 7 prophesied light-eaters who are meant to defeat Caul.
- Noor had her peculiar ability as a baby, which is very rare.
- She is mildly claustrophobic.[7]
- Although she is a main character in the second trilogy, there isn't a photo of her in the books.
References[]
- ↑ The Conference of the Birds (Chapter 4)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 A Map of Days (Chapter 15)
- ↑ The Conference of the Birds (Chapter 1)
- ↑ The Conference of the Birds (Chapter 11)
- ↑ A Map of Days (Chapter 19)
- ↑ The Conference of the Birds (Chapter 2)
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 The Conference of the Birds (Chapter 3)
- ↑ The Conference of the Birds (Chapter 5)
- ↑ The Conference of the Birds (Chapter 6)
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 The Conference of the Birds (Chapter 10)
- ↑ The Conference of the Birds (Chapter 9)