Often existing the dark, Gonzalez uses illumination to create some more complicated surroundings, or at least imply intricacy beyond the characters’ perceptions. On one hand, his figures are simple though animated, with blank faces and personalities that spring forth through body language. With the band, it becomes more complicated, as Laura’s eccentricities also highlight differences, in this case with her bandmates, and also hint that she’s holding something inside her that she feels uneasy about sharing.Īs Gonzalez portrays two eras of female defiance towards the norms of the times and the accompanying embrace of the weird and the dark, he does so with incredibly beautiful illustration. This causes her to dig in further regarding the expression of her experience and taunting her younger sister with it, making the difference she feels from the rest of her family into more of a defiance designed to accentuate her self-identity. Teresa is at odds with her younger sister, who spies on her and threatens to be a snitch, and also her older sisters, who reject and ridicule her interests and talents.

The band’s real secret weapon is Laura, though, whose lyrics Christina describes as “the Bronte Sisters giving a talk about the study on the thermonuclear fusion of stars,” which Christina also believes will change the world once they are unleashed in musical form.Īfter establishing the two time periods and creating thematic links between the characters, Gonzalez steps back from forming any obvious linear ones that will transform into a standard time travel plot and instead takes a more poetic and elusive approach to examining the dynamic between the band members in 2016 and Teresa and her sisters in 1856. Gloria admits she has no musical ability, but that’s viewed as a strength by the other two. In 2016, Gloria is meeting up with Laura after listening to Laura’s band’s demo tape and agreeing to meet the other member, Christina, in order to decide whether to join the band or not. When we first meet her, she’s out in the woods at night encountering an extremely strange thing, a skeleton that is not dead and that feels a consuming sadness that sends it seeking solace in the night sky. In 1856, Teresa stymies her family with her obsession with unexplained weirdness and her insistence on writing poetry about her thoughts and her encounters with strange things. A Gift For A Ghost follows two narrative paths.

A gift for a ghost by borja gonzález