Girl: Shadow – A Q&A with Matthew Forsythe About Aggie & the Ghost

I hereby declare ghosts to be the picture book trending creatures of 2025. Some years we see a plethora of chickens. Other years, bears. This year the clear-cut winner is ghosts ghosts ghosts. Don’t believe me? Whether it’s I Hate Everything or The Grumpy Ghost Upstairs or The Little Ghost Quilt’s Winter Surprise or To Catch a Ghost or even the tiny ghost in Jon Klassen’s Your Forest, they are in these books and a SLEW more! But of all these titles, the ghost with the most? That would have to be the fellow I spotted in Matthew Forsythe’s Aggie & the Ghost (out August 19th).

Now Matthew Forsythe? Talk about a force to be reckoned with. His book Pokko and the Drum is widely considered to be a literal modern day classic (and if you haven’t seen it, BOY are you in for a treat!).

I got a chance to talk to Forsythe about his latest, but first? A bit of a rundown of what this particular book consists of:

“Aggie is very excited to live on her own—until she finds out her new house is haunted. But no fear, the situation is nothing that can’t be fixed with a carefully considered list of rules: No haunting after dark. No stealing socks. No eating all the food.

But the ghost doesn’t like playing by the rules and challenges Aggie to an epic game of tic-tac-toe—winner gets the house.”

Intrigued? Well might you be. Let’s chat with the creator, shall we?

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Betsy Bird: Matthew! It’s been about three years since you last brought us a picture book (MINA) and clearly the wait was worth it. AGGIE AND THE GHOST is the sort of picture book that other picture book creators look at and then despair upon seeing. The writing is tight and funny, the art blooms off the page, and the whole damn thing is a treat. Origin story then, please. Whence AGGIE?

Matthew Forsythe: Thank you!

The book has several origins but here is one of them: Two summers ago, I backpacked around Greece with my Spanish friend, Emmanuel.

Emmanuel – who is one of my closest friends – has no sense of boundaries and for an introvert like me, this was both wonderful and torturous. Everywhere I turned, he would be there. He would steal my clean socks. He would eat my cheese. I felt haunted.

How do you create boundaries with someone like him? Rules don’t work.

BB: Shoot. Now all I want to do is ask you more questions about Emmanuel, but I gotta stick to my script. Okay. So, the very first line of the book begins, “Aggie was very excited to live on her own…” and we get Aggie in her pointed hoodie and bindle on the page. Stories in which kids, or kid stand-ins, live on their own is a kind of fantasy that a LOT of children relate to (ghost roommates aside). In contrast, both MINA and POKKO had their heroines in (mildly disappointing) family units. Why give Aggie this autonomy?

Matthew: This is a good question and I only really thought about it late in the writing process. As you know, you’re kind of in a dream state when you’re writing, and you’re not necessarily thinking on a rational level. I think the answer is Aggie is older than she looks. And she has protective powers in that bindle that she hides from all of us.

I also wonder why she wants to be on her own. Where is she coming from? The book sort of asks us this question. I think the answer maybe is different for all of us.

BB: Fair enough. You know, stories in which girls befriend supernatural entities abound in every possible medium. Rarer are stories in which girls come to a reluctant, if occasionally fond, peace with the otherworldly. I’ve little sense of your craft or process, so I’m unsure if you knew how this book would end when you began creating it, or if it changed in the process of creation and editing. Was AGGIE AND THE GHOST the same from start to finish or did it go through significant changes? 

Matthew: Yes, it did go through one major change and I have to credit my friend Susan Yoon for making me re-work the ending – in a way that I think improved the story.

I work on a show called Adventure Time – one of the hallmarks of the show is this sort of empty third act; where nothing is essentially learned and the main characters kind of re-affirm their nature. Originally, AatG had an ending like that: Aggie is one way, the ghost is another – they stay the same; womp, womp – we all remain haunted.

But Susan read an early draft of the book and told me, “I’m not completely comfortable with a book about a girl asking for space and not getting it.” Which kind of shook me. So I took the third act apart, looked at all the pieces, and put it back together again. And that’s how we have the ending that we have.

BB: A point to Susan then. There is a magnificent spread in this book that is two-pages and nearly wordless. Aggie has given the ghost rules and it has flagrantly disregarded them, so she goes for a walk in the rain. What follows is two pages of wet green and blue woods, the hooded Aggie visible in the lower right-hand corner (Dear Simon & Schuster – Please turn this into a poster for all of us to purchase – thank you). Now in 2025 you have also illustrated Gianni Rodari’s THE GRAMMAR OF FANTASY. The idea of a Red Riding Hood of different colors is a significant part of that book. I can’t help but wonder if working on Rodari’s book affected your work on AGGIE at all. Was there any overlap in the two projects for you? Did one project influence the other at all? 

Matthew: Yes, absolutely!

Gianni Rodari is a huge influence on my writing. He talks about how all stories are based on two ideas — or energies — encountering each other. So for me, I think of stories in this way: Pokko was “Frog: Drum”; Mina was “Mouse: Father”; Aggie was “Girl: Shadow”.

Incidentally, one of my favourite painters is Paul Klee – and he says the same thing about colour. All colour is relational. Colours express themselves through the colour beside them (contrast) or the colour on top of them (Saturation) or the light revealing them (Chroma). Klee is also one of Rodari’s influences.

These principles are kind of the basis for how I understand writing and painting.

BB: Just wondering, and there may not be a good answer to this (in which case I’ll skip asking it of you entirely) but why the name “Aggie”? A cursory study of picture books finds that the market was, until now, Aggie-free. Any particular reason you settled on that name?

Matthew: Well, the character Aggie is partly based on my mother. She loves to read and loves time to herself (she also shows up as Pokko’s mother in Pokko and the Drum). Her name is Marguerite – but her close friends call her Maggie. So from there it was a short jump to get to Aggie.

BB: Fair enough. Finally, you appear to be an incredibly busy man. What else do you happen to have going on these days? What’s next for you?

Matthew: Right now, I’m on a new season of the animated show, Adventure Time at Warner Bros. I’m a designer on the show. I worked on the original series ten years ago – so It’s super fun to be back on a team with old friends and new artists.

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Very cool stuff. And for the record, I had a chance to have dinner with Matthew at the last ALA and he allowed me to gush for a time over the brilliance of Rebecca Sugar. But THAT is a conversation for another day!

HUGE thanks to Matthew for his thoughtful and highly entertaining answers to my questions. Aggie & the Ghost is, as I mentioned before, out August 19th. Thanks too to Lindsey Ferris and the team at Simon & Schuster for helping to put this talk together. After all, if ghosts are the trend of 2025, then you might as well check out the best of the best.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2025, Interviews