Everyone knows what a ghost looks like. You take a white sheet and cut two holes for the eyes.
No?
Well, that’s what the ghosts in Brenna Thummler’s Sheets look like. The book is drawn in softened angles and muted pastels, sometimes going for pages of panels without a need for words. The effect is nostalgic, at times whimsical, and often melancholy.
Sheets is a quiet story. A young ghost who doesn’t enjoy his afterlife escapes to the living world, hiding in a laundromat. A girl whose mother has passed and whose father is struggling tries to save the family laundromat on her own. They strike up an unlikely, sometimes unwieldy, friendship.
It’s a story about grief, how isolating it can feel, and how difficult it can be to express. It’s about finding community, helping each other, and the winding path forward.
Review by Cathlin
Sheets by Brenna Thummler
A story of ghosts, family, loneliness, and laundromats.
Marjorie Glatt feels like a ghost. A practical thirteen-year-old in charge of the family laundry business, her daily routine features unforgiving customers, unbearable P.E. classes, and the fastidious Mr. Saubertuck who is committed to destroying everything she's worked for. Wendell is a ghost. A boy who lost his life much too young, his daily routine features ineffective death therapy, a sheet-dependent identity, and a dangerous need to seek purpose in the forbidden human world. When their worlds collide, Marjorie is confronted by unexplainable disasters as Wendell transforms Glatt's Laundry into his midnight playground, appearing as a mere sheet during the day. While Wendell attempts to create a new afterlife for himself, he unknowingly sabotages the life that Marjorie is struggling to maintain.
Sheets illustrates the determination of a young girl to fight, even when all parts of her world seem to be conspiring against her. It proves that second chances are possible whether life feels over or life is over. But above all, it is a story of the forgiveness and unlikely friendship that can only transpire inside a haunted laundromat.
