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Staff Pick by Judith W.

Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol

Get this graphic novel in the catalog.

Female friendship, always a tricky business, is particularly dicey during high school. The person you consider to be your best friend may be exactly that, but she may also be your chief underminer and most enthusiastic behind-your-back critic.

So the relationship between Anya Borzakovskaya, a sullen New England private-school girl, and Emily, a hollow-eyed 100-something-year-old ghost who died 90 years earlier, is bound to be problematic. Their friendship, and its fallout, is the subject of “Anya’s Ghost,” a remarkable first graphic novel by Vera Brosgol, an illustrator and animator based in Portland, Ore.

Things get off to an inauspicious start for Anya. While brooding over the pitfalls of adolescence — her sourpuss frenemy, Siobhan; the cute basketball player, Sean, and his impeccably blond girlfriend; her Russian mother’s home-country cooking and the status of her own expanding thighs — Anya tumbles into an abandoned well. There she meets Emily, a floating white plume who emerges from an abandoned skeleton. A forlorn wisp of a girl/ghost, Emily is eager for companionship. ~Read more at the New York Times website.