[...] throughout it there are small gems." The Wall Street Journal reviewer Sam Sacks referred to the novel as a "homely attempt at a Melvillean sea adventure" and described it as "a bad book" but added "it's a fun bad book and offers plenty of disarming insights into who Kerouac was as a person and writer before he slipped behind the mask of Beat Generation Zen-master channeling literature from the ionosphere." Sacks further commented that "the book is enjoyable because, unlike Kerouac's later canonized work, it comes to its faults honestly, out of simple inexperience. The prose is a warbly approximation of what the 21-year-old novelist must have hoped was a sophisticated high style." Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly awarded The Sea Is My Brother a B rating and described Kerouac as "still struggling to find his voice [but] you'll see hints of the bebop prose that would later pour out of Kerouac's typewriter so effortlessly." References 1942 American novels 2011 American novels Novels by Jack Kerouac Novels published posthumously Penguin Books books