Jacob was your average teenager. He worked at one of the chain of drugstores his mother's family owns, he goes to school and has a grandpa that lives in a senior community in Florida. But when his grandpa calls him frantically asking where the key to his weapons collection is because the monsters have finally found him, the life he thought was his is a complete falsehood. When he discovers his grandpa slashed across the middle in the woods behind his house, his grandpa uses the very last of his breath to tell him to find the bird and the loop, that the letter will lead him on his way. Jacob barely has the time to process what he's said when something comes charging through the woods. With the faint light of the flashlight, he sees a gruesome creature with tentacle-esque tongues before it disappears.
In the months after his grandfather's death, the image of the creature haunts his dreams. He has become riddled with anxiety and confused by what his grandfather had told him to do. It isn't until they are cleaning out the house that he finds the box of photographs he remembers from his youth. As a child, his grandfather would tell Jacob of the levitating girl who needed weighted shoes to stay down, of the boy who had bees living inside of him, of the brother and sister who could lift boulders like feathers that lived on the island he fled to when the Nazis were sweeping through Poland. It was years ago that Jacob said they were nothing but fairy tale, but was he wrong? Were these photos, these children, this island that his grandfather had talked about linked to the monsters shaking him in the night?
It's at his birthday party that he finds what he's been looking for. He grabs for the book his aunt had given him from his grandfather's house and a letter slips out. Jacob retreats to his room and finds that this it the letter his grandfather was talking about. Armed with this new information, Jacob sets off to find the answers that wait for him on the island. Who are the people in these yellowing photographs? What will this adventure tell him about not only his grandfather, but himself?
I'd had my eye on this book for a long time. I would walk through the store for a good two months with it under my arm before I finally decided to buy it. And here I am months later finally reading it. The creepy girl on the cover is definitely what drew me in. Until I really looked at it, I didn't even realize that she was levitating. Yes, you know that the book is going to be creepy when you pick it up, but I honestly didn't see where it was going. This book completely took me by surprise in the sense that it didn't go in the direction that I thought it would. I wasn't surprised that I liked it as much as I did. It definitely kept you on your toes and forced you to pay attention to the little details.
I just read that the author is currently working on the sequel. Thank God because the ending definitely leaves you hanging and wanting to figure out exactly what happens next. Add the sequel to my most-anticipated list!
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