By Flavia Z. Drago
A little ghost who can float through walls and glow in the dark and still can't work up the nerve to say hello to anybody.
Gustavo is a ghost, which means he can do all sorts of wonderful things. He walks through walls. He floats. He sends objects flying around the room, he glows beautifully in the dark, and he plays the violin better than anyone. The one thing he can't do is talk to people. He'd love to be friends with the other monsters, especially Alma, but he's so shy that he hovers at the edge of everything and nobody ever notices he's there, which is a real problem when you're already see-through. So Gustavo does the bravest thing he can think of. He writes out invitations to a violin concert at the cemetery on the Day of the Dead, leaves them where the monsters will find them, and then waits, sure that no one is going to come.
All the spooky look, none of the spooky feeling. Drago draws skeletons and mummies and a moonlit cemetery in hot pinks and oranges, so the whole thing reads like a party instead of a graveyard, and the real story underneath is just about being too shy to say hello. If you've got a child who loves Halloween but doesn't actually want to be scared, this is the sweet spot. And a child who tends to go quiet in the doorway of a birthday party may see a lot of themselves in Gustavo, a ghost who feels the way they do and still gets his happy ending.