Rating: 4.5/5 
 ***Spoiler-free*** 
 I've been wanting to read this book for a very long time, and finally got around to it. I was debating whether to give this book 4 or 4.5 stars, but on the account that I found myself severely unwilling to stop flipping pages at around the halfway point, I decided to give it 4.5 stars. I found this book to be original and I've never read anything like it. 
 This book is told from the perspective of Jacob, a 16 year old boy who lives a pretty unextraordinary life in Florida. However, when he was a kid, his grandfather would tell him fascinating stories of his time on an island off the coast of Wales where children with special abilities lived. After his grandfather is killed in strange circumstances, Jacob travels to the island with his father in pursuit of some sort of explanation for his grandfather's last words. 
 I found the story really cool to begin with. The photographs integrated into the story and the originality of it really drew me in. I thought it was only good and interesting until I reached around the halfway point, where I found that the book got more and more amazing. I really enjoyed how there weren't really pointless characters introduced, and that a lot of the scenes had some sort of purpose or meaning. My favourite part was being able to connect the dots between events to discover something that's going to happen, or to explain something that already happened. 
 While a lot of things in this book were fantastic, there were some things that could've been improved. I feel like some parts of the books were just massive information drops, and it was a bit difficult to keep up with. Also, although the story was interesting throughout, I feel like the conflict, or antagonist(s) were introduced too late. I also didn't find this book very scary like I expected, but that didn't really take anything away from the book for me. 
 Overall, I found this book really enjoyable and the whole thing with the photographs was cool and unique. I believe there are a total of about 50 photographs that were woven into the story really well. There are aspects of horror, fantasy, and sci-fi found throughout this book. If you're a fan of any of those genres, I would definitely recommend this book, because it was a pretty great experience. I'm looking forward to reading the second book.