Review: Bad Island by Doug TenNapel

Bad Island

by Doug TenNapel

Genre: Graphic Novel

Pages: Hardback, 224

Publisher: Graphix (Scholastic)

Something on this island is up to no good . . .

When Reese is forced to go on a boating trip with his family, the last thing he expects is to be shipwrecked on an island-especially one teeming with weird plants and animals. But what starts out as simply a bad vacation turns into a terrible one, as the castaways must find a way to escape while dodging the island's dangerous inhabitants. With few resources and a mysterious entity on the hunt, each secret unlocked could save them . . . or spell their doom. One thing Reese knows for sure: This is one Bad Island.

I am not usually one to read graphic novels but I have been given some to review so I wanted to branch out and get into this genre. And I was not disappointed with this one. Bad Island tells of two seemingly unrelated stories of a world thousands of years ago where a son left to fight in a war despite his father’s desires for him to stay behind and a present day son who is struggling to find himself as a part of his family. I don’t know if TenNapel set out for the relationship parallel to play such a major role in the story, but to me it did. When you read novels, pictures are often left up to the reader to create based on the words the author uses. This is not the case (obviously) with graphic novels and I found that I really liked that. Reese (the teenage son) and his sister Janie were able to help their parents and seeing the author’s interpretation in pictures was great. Janie and her pet snake made me laugh (out loud) on quite a few occasions! Overall, I really enjoyed this one and will be reading TenNapel’s other graphic novel (Ghostopolis) soon.

Visit Dough TenNapel HERE.