Ghosts

As with her previous work, Bay Area author and artist Raina Telgemeier (Smile, Drama) excels at capturing slice-of-life stories and characters at organically important moments. A gentle love letter to California’s coasts and history, Ghosts is the story of a family—including Catrina and her younger sister with cystic fibrosis, Maya—that moves to a supernatural hotspot just in time for Día de los Muertos. At opposite ends of their “tweens,” Cat is trapped in impending adulthood while Maya’s childhood is unshakable even while grappling with her own mortality. Telgemeier herself doesn’t shake childhood from the story—a tear-jerker, no doubt—which enables her to maintain an innocence that breathes boundless beauty into the panels. The straightforward layout provides readability for the young demographic, but Telgemeier packs a lot into the linear panels. The diverse California landscapes, Cat’s Día de los Muertos makeup, and the ghosts—a crossed style between vintage cartoons and Hayao Miyazaki—all bring a wealth of life to a surreal vision of love and death.