She herself is an immigrant and by her word we learn that she’s worked very hard to compensate for her inauspicious country of origin. She’s a typical teen from an immigrant family. In the first place, Brosgol works hard to make Anya a character who very easily could be weird or strange or unwelcome but isn’t. Life Lesson #1: Don’t fall down pits in the park. So really, the joy is in the details of how the story all works out rather than in the genius of any of the three parts on their own. A girl named Anya, high school shenanigans, and, of course, a ghost. Anya’s Ghost, as one may have guessed by now, is about three things. There are even moments when I found myself gleefully surprised at a direction in which Vera Brosgol would choose to take her story. Thankfully, Anya’s Ghost avoids most of the usual traps of the form. There are always a few works of the genre that don’t play to cliché. Maybe it’s different in other schools around the country, but according to my experience in Orange County circa 1990, school-based YA lit just doesn’t ring true. It’s more just that I never felt as if I couldn’t, if I had wanted to, talk to someone and have them not snub me outright. It’s not as if I wasn’t kind of nerdy or kind of artsy or kind of freaky. Or maybe there were but I was just too blissfully ignorant to notice. When I was in high school, there wasn’t a lot of bullying.
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