Ransom Riggs
First Sentence: I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.
Just like this book and this book I was seduced by the packaging. As those other two books show, that’s a risky way of choosing a book – sometimes it pays off, sometimes not so much. This novel is presented as a story accompanied by photographs. The picture on the front cover alone is eerie enough, but once you take a look at the back cover you can see exactly why I was so tempted by this book. Terrifying indeed! The story itself however is not much to write home about. Jacob is sixteen and living an ordinary American teenager’s life. His grandfather is prone to flights of fancy and often tells stories of his time in a remote home for children on an island off the coast of Wales. After Jacob’s grandfather dies, Jacob is compelled to travel to this remote island and discover the truth about his grandfather’s childhood. What follows could easily have been as chilling and intriguing as those photographs, but rather this descends into a rather ludicrous story involving time travel and time loops and cartoon like characters. I was expecting something along the lines of Danielewski’s House of Leaves but instead got something akin to a poorly written Scooby-Doo episode. Very disappointing
*
Book Atlas 