This was certainly a good book club pick for October! The credit goes to my mom. 
 This is very much a YA book. I expected it to be about Miss Peregrine and the peculiar children, but it was really all about the teenage protagonist Jacob. He's a modern-day kid with no terribly distinctive or outstanding qualities. Being stuck in his head for the first 2/3 of the book made for a rather ho-hum story, but then things really picked up. 
 (view spoiler)[I was surprised there was so much action in this book. I flew through the last third of it relatively quickly. I wasn't expecting the gore, either, but it wasn't too unsettling. Monsters are always sort of disappointing bad guys; antagonists that are not just pure evil are far more interesting to me. But the highly unusual world of the story was enough to make the book entertaining. 
 I didn't really buy the romance between Emma and Jacob. One minute she's ready to kill him, and the next she's all googly-eyed. And we never really know why--there's no actual chemistry between the two characters. This author seems to be much better at world building than character development. I'd love to know how this story was developed. Did the kids start out as ghosts? When did it become a time travel story? Were there kinks that had to be worked out to make the hollows and wights work with the time loop concept? I wish a little more had been done with Jacob's unique ability to see the monsters. I expected the other kids to have to learn to use him as their eyes, but that didn't really seem to happen. (hide spoiler)] 
 The blending of real photos and fantasy story was interesting. I enjoyed seeing the creepy photos, but it sort of took me out of the story every time I came across one. I started wondering what the true story behind each photo was. I think I would've preferred if they'd been in an album at the back of the book, although it was fun to be able to turn so many pages so quickly. 
 All in all, it was fun but nothing too special. I'm definitely curious to see if they changed anything about the story in the movie adaptation. I hope the book club can go on a field trip!