Bookwagon loves Gustavo the Shy Ghost and recommends it for sharing, reading a lot and gifting, too.

Was the idea behind the story largely based on your own childhood and why was this an important message for you to share? In one hand we had the black and white Universal Monsters tribute and a nostalgic ghost, which made me think of vintage pictures in sepia tones; on the other hand, we have the really bright Mexican colours.I was at my last school for 4 years and we had ********* book fairs every term – and every term, I was disappointed by the narrow range of books. Flavia: Hmmm, this is an interesting question… I am a fan of Bosch and Pieter Brueghel who are known by painting incredibly detailed scene, but also some Mexican folk art tends to have lots of details and colour, I guess I must have picked up something from them!

As a fun fact, in the graveyard scenes, you can find the names of my late grandparents engraved in the tombstones – Chuta, Lupe, Rolando and Tuto. They would also only drop off a case of books and leave us to run it – it was so lovely to have you on hand to chat to the children and recommend them books, as well as the small (but appreciated! The first blend I tried was too limited; the second one was too colourful and there was nothing really magical about it, so I had to stop for a while and think about the world I had just created. Mat: The design of the whole book, from the cover to the endpapers and everything in between is a delight.Gustavo is good at doing all sorts of ghostly things: walking through walls, making objects fly, and glowing in the dark.