Sinful Book Reviews

The Bramble is about a young boy who’s teased by the other kids, and sometime ignored by them. When he wanders into the Bramble, he finds a new world with new possibilities.

I’m a little torn on what this book really is. It’s marked as a graphic novel, but I went into it with the mind set of a picture book. It certainly has frames similar to that of graphic novels. Still, I think this could easily be read by very young children (especially since it’s mostly wordless), and that puts it the picture book realm for me. While I found the illustrations beautiful, I wasn’t impressed with the story. It just felt like a new version of Where the Wild Things Are. Cameron journeys to the other side of The Bramble, where he finds odd shaped creatures who help him learn. They even kind of looked like the creatures in Where the Wild Things Are. If a book is reminding me too much of another book, that immediately puts it in the “not recommended” category. Sorry, but originality is important, especially in children’s books. That’s what makes one book stand out from another and it seems to happen so rarely for me with picture books.