Today Marshmallow reviews the 2018 graphic novel Sheets by Brenna Thummler.
Marshmallow’s Quick Take: If you like books about ghosts and friendship, then this might be the book for you.
Marshmallow’s Summary (with Spoilers): Marjorie Glatt has a lot of problems in her life. She has to run her deceased mother’s laundromat to support her brother and father, she has to deal with mean kids at school, and she has to battle Mr. Saubertuck, a rude man who is trying to take Marj’s laundromat and convert it into his yoga spa. Mr. Saubertuck sabotages her laundromat, making her lose her customers and their trust. And school isn’t much better. She doesn’t have any friends and one girl in particular, Tessi, is very mean to her.
However, her life is about to change when Wendell arrives. Wendell is a ghost who escaped from the land of the dead. For Wendell, the laundromat is a playground compared to the dreary Land of the Dead. However, Wendell gets a little carried away and starts to hurt Marj’s business. He makes a blanket fort with the sheets Marj just washed for her customers. They get dirty again and it makes Marj look both bad and like a liar when she tells her customers that it was the wind. At this point , Marj doesn’t know anything about ghosts, but she gets suspicious when Tessi’s dress for a recital gets dyed red. We learn that Mr. Saubertuck put red dye into the detergent to ruin Marj’s business. When Wendell tried to dispose of the dye, he spilled it accidentally on Tessi’s dress. Marj, understandably, gets upset at him.
Will Mr. Saubertuck drive Marj out of her mother’s business? And will Wendell and Marj ever be able to become friends? You need to read to find out!
Marshmallow’s Review: I think that Sheets is a very interesting book. The author Brenna Thummler has created a very unique book and it was definitely a fun read. I liked how the author created two very interesting worlds; both the Land of the Dead and the real world were both realistic but had a touch of fantasy and fiction.
Sheets is a graphic novel which made it very easy to read and also showed me what the characters and their world look like. I think that the author’s portrayal of Mr. Saubertuck made him a very dislikeable character. He is self-centered and presumptuous. I felt really sympathetic toward Marj when he kept saying stuff like, “I won’t be paying you. Your family will have a room in my extravagant five-star spa and yoga resort, remember?” (Keep in mind, his “extravagant five-star spa and yoga resort” hasn’t even been established yet.)
I felt really sad for Wendell because he is a small child who, we learn, died at the young age of eleven. He is immature, playful, and not ready to face death. He makes up stories about how he died which he tells to the other ghosts in the Land of the Dead. We don’t learn how he really died until Marj looks it up on the Internet. I felt sad that Wendell died, especially after we learned that Marj had met him before when she was lost in a corn maze.
There is another book from this author, Brenna Thummler, called Delicates, published in 2021, which explores the friendship of Marj and Wendell further. I haven’t read it yet; I just finished Sheets this week! However, I would enjoy the chance to read about Marj and Wendell once more.
Marshmallow’s Rating: 95%.
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