Borja González

A Gift for a Ghost was an interesting, if not fully satisfying reading experience. It was beautiful in its design and contrast--the simplicity of the figures and colors was able to create two disparate, rich worlds. The book’s appearance is beautiful and cohesive--I love the design of the speech bubbles, and how they serve as extensions for the strange human forms. The figures with their spindly arms and legs, and sometimes gravity-defying body language were very expressive, but I do think only identifying characters by their hair, names, and context is troublesome at times. This book seems to lend itself to a couple of read-throughs, which makes a cool relationship between the work and the reader--I think when a book isn’t necessarily “easy,” and the reader has to work a bit to see the connections being implied, it’s a much more interactive relationship between book and reader (like a bridge between two time periods...).

The actual plot, I think, is secondary to the kind of emotional rummaging that the characters are engaging with. The relationships are incomplete but believable, the actions are usually unexplained and resist justification, but it all works, and adds to the subtle magic that’s occurring within the world of the story. You get a sense that the main characters are quietly struggling with something, and feel linked and passionate to times/people/ideas characters around them willfully won’t or can't understand (for reasons like: it’s tiresome, it’s inappropriate, it’s silly, or it can only be explained by kind of time travel); the characters experience a kind of self-placed isolation for all of this--the women at the center of the story won’t compromise on their ideals and infatuations in order to “fit in.” It’s all a lot like being a teenager.… (more)