There's a Ghost in This House: 12/15/21

In There's a Ghost in This House by Oliver Jeffers a mysterious girl offers a tour of her Victorian house to the reader, asking if they see any ghosts. With a flip of some semi transparent pages, the ghosts are revealed to the reader but not to the host.

This is a beautiful picture book that fosters a sense of nostalgia for me. When I was a child in the 1970s-1980s, there were a bunch of different picture books that used variations on the trick Jeffers uses here. They would either reveal missing details, change the colors, or somehow graphically extend the story in a way a more traditional picture book wouldn't. I adored these books, and here all these years later, I still do.

Jeffer's book differs a little from the ones I remember because the added pages are semi-opaque, rather like frosted waxed paper. To hide the ghosts from the reader until the page is turned, they need to be this almost white color.

The house itself is rendered in muted earth colors. The ghosts are rendered as while sheet-like blobs with eyes. The only bright color is the tour guide who is done in a palette of greens and blues. The whole thing makes this a picture book equivalent to the delightfully weird film, A Ghost Story (2017) (minus the R rating).

Five stars

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