Hello everyone! You may remember when I posted an image of Little Ghost’s Summerween, the second installment in the Little Ghost picture book series by Maggie Edkins Willis, to my Instagram, Threads, Twitter and Bluesky in February. In those posts, I announced that I was invited to review an advance reading copy of the book ahead of its release date by Simon & Schuster. Well, with the book’s recent release, I am happy to share my review! Be sure to get it on Amazon today! You can also check out Willis’s website at this link! Below is the book’s synopsis:
Little Ghost tries to pick the perfect party theme for his summer birthday in this charming picture book companion to Little Ghost Makes a Friend by bestselling author-illustrator Maggie Edkins Willis.
Little Ghost loves parties, but he’s only ever had the Halloween kind! After attending his first ever birthday party, Little Ghost decides to throw one of his own. His good friend Anya says his party should celebrate Little Ghost and what he likes most. That’s easy—Little Ghost loves Halloween with all its bats, black cats, candy corn, and pumpkins. There’s just one problem: it’s summertime. And Halloween and summer just don’t mix…or do they?
I’m glad to have been given this opportunity after my previous review of Unicorns in Uniforms! But before we begin, I would like to give a heads up to some spoilers to the book. Let’s try not to get too spooked by these pages, shall we?
Background
In February 2026, I received a message from Thad Whittier of Simon & Schuster, who told me that he was reaching out to discuss a possible review, interview, or feature for Little Ghost’s Summerween by Maggie Edkins Willis. According to the book’s jacket, Willis grew up in Missouri and Maine. She now writes and illustrates books for children from her home studio in the Hudson Valley, where she lives with her husband and two children. Her debut picture book, Little Ghost Makes a Friend, is a bestseller. She is also the creator of the picture books Little Ghost’s Summerween, Dinky the Tinysaur, and Thunderland, and the middle grade graphic novel Smaller Sister.
Whittier told me that Little Ghost’s Summerween is a bright, cozy picture book that taps into the Summerween trend and turns it into a birthday story with Halloween details, summertime energy, and a genuinely sweet ending. He also told me that this new installment brings Little Ghost back with the same tender tone and expressive art, just swapped into a sunny setting. It’s an easy fit for spring and summer roundups, especially anything tied to birthdays, read alouds, or Halloween loving kids. The series will continue with Little Ghost’s Valentines, which will be published in December 2026. You can also learn more about the season of Summerween from Good Morning America, The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Better Homes & Gardens, and The New York Times.
To receive a book review request from a major publisher such as Simon & Schuster was an honor (this was actually the first book I got from the publisher), so I thanked Whittier for reaching out and told him that I really appreciated the opportunity to review Little Ghost’s Summerween. I also told him that I’d be happy to receive a finished copy when available, and that I was open to including a short-written Q&A with Willis in my post if that’s something he’d like to coordinate. Whittier told me that he’d be happy to coordinate a written Q&A, and when I received the copy, I posted a picture of it on my Instagram, Threads, Twitter and Bluesky ahead of its release, which you can also see below.
When I finally got around to reading the book, I decided to submit the following questions below. But then I got an automated email telling me that Whittier was no longer at Simon & Schuster, and to please direct all communications to Publicity Director Alex Kelleher. So, I submitted my questions to Kelleher, who told me that he’d be happy to coordinate the interview with Willis. He also asked if I have a physical copy of the book, which I confirmed. And I’m happy to report that Willis got back to me with the following answers!
Q: What sparked the idea for a summer-themed Halloween story like Little Ghost’s Summerween?
A: We knew we wanted Little Ghost to have a second adventure, and my editor, the great Catherine Laudone, had read an article recently about Summerween catching on as a trend. I also learned while promoting Little Ghost Makes a Friend that kids are excited about Halloween year-round and that “spooky stuff” really does have legs in other seasons. My husband also happens to have a job that is extremely busy in the fall, and he often misses celebrating Halloween with our kids, and I’ve often thought Summerween would be a great idea for us as a family. When Catherine brought it up to me, I’d already been thinking of this as a theme. It felt like the perfect fit!
Q: How did your approach to color and atmosphere shift when moving from a fall setting to a summer one?
A: I really wanted to keep the cozy feel of the first book while also adding a layer of sunshine, which I did by pumping up the yellow tones of the palette. I also didn’t use any blue in the palette for the first book, and I needed to add that for the water in the illustrations to feel refreshing and inviting. I try to make the inside of Little Ghost’s house feel antique and a little dusty, and the contrast between the interior scenes and the bright, poppy, and very energetic outdoor scenes was fun to play with. I wanted to keep a sense of spooky Halloween with a lot of the background details as well, by using typical Halloween tropes like spiders and pumpkins and candy corn and putting a freshly summery spin on them. There’s a lot to find in the background details if you look!
Q: What do you hope young readers take away from Little Ghost’s celebration and its message?
A: In the first book, Little Ghost is making an effort to put himself out into the world and to make friends. In this second adventure, he’s building on that. Now that he has made new friends, he wants to connect with them and fit in by participating in activities they enjoy (in this case, birthday parties!) to expose them to some of the things he loves most (which is, of course, Halloween). In order to do that, he first has to look inside himself and find the confidence to be different, by celebrating a holiday in a new time of the year. That’s what I want readers to take away from this story—it’s okay to break the “rules” and be who you are, even if that makes you stand out.
Q: How do you balance cozy and spooky elements when creating stories for younger audiences?
A: Something about Little Ghost Makes a Friend that I think resonated with parents was that it is a particularly gentle book for Halloween. I have two very young children, and I see how frightened they can be of decorations in our neighborhood that I don’t see as all that spooky—for example, my son was really spooked one year by a house with giant spider decorations crawling all over it. I think taking some of those elements but really softening them down to make them sweet and friendly appeals to caregivers who want their kids to experience the holiday without getting too freaked out. There are spiders, but they’re helping decorate for a party or spelling out something sweet in their webs. You asked about the palette before, and I think that has been a useful tool in the covers of both books to communicate what you will find inside in terms of the tone. Next to other Halloween books on the shelf, Little Ghost Makes a Friend has a gentler and more neutral palette, with some soft, sparkly notes and a clear message of friendship between Little Ghost and Anya. Similarly, the cover for Summerween is decidedly happy and focused on the relationship between the characters, rather than the creepier background details, but they’re there in an unthreatening way if you look for them!
Q: What was your favorite scene or moment to write or illustrate in Little Ghost’s Summerween, and why?
A: I loved coming up with summery twists on Halloween costumes for the characters, and I loved drawing any of the scenes where Little Ghost is playing in the pool. And there is one smaller illustration in particular of Little Ghost on his back on a candy corn floatie with big sunglasses that I just love. I think it very simply communicates in one image everything I want this book to say about the holiday of Summerween, and I think we all want to be as relaxed and refreshed as Little Ghost looks in that moment.
But how was the book, anyway? Does it inspire me to get my Summerween on?
The Review
Before I go into this review, I would just like to say that I haven’t read Little Ghost Makes a Friend yet, so for those of you who’ve already read it, keep this in mind if I make any assumptions that the first book already clarified. But I have to say, this book was really cute, with a simple yet effective plot against the backdrop of a really interesting series premise, even being a little innovative along the way. We open to Little Ghost, who gets an invitation to a “Camp-Out Birthday” party. He and his mother have haunted the house they live in for a hundred years, though they occupy it like humans would as if they were still alive, complete with bedrooms such as Little Ghost’s bedroom, which looks really good. And the ghosts are certainly not scary looking, with their designs being archetypical bed sheet ghosts. It’s very simple, but it works really well for a picture book.
In this world, ghosts don’t have birthdays, which is interesting because you figured that ghosts would remember the day that they were born, at least in a lot of other media featuring ghosts. At the very least, Little Ghost and his mother could check their gravestones, though that’s probably a bit grim for the tone of this series. Also, I’m curious about Little Ghost’s father, though he may have appeared or was mentioned in the first book or will appear or be mentioned in the next book or a later installment. Little Ghost has only ever celebrated Halloween parties, though Anya, his human companion, encourages him to go to the birthday party to get out of his comfort zone and try something new. The relationship between Anya and Little Ghost easily reminds me of the relationships Casper has with human children in the Casper the Friendly Ghost franchise. And by the way, Anya’s design is adorable. Her almost chibi-like shape (and those of the other kids) is super cute, and I especially love how her hair frames most of her body. Willis’s art style in general is lovely, with the shifting thickness of her lines and the childlike designs feeling like the drawings of a really skilled child artist, which fits the tone of the series really nicely.
From the first exchange Anya and Little Ghost have, they speak in word balloons, which I found very surprising. I’ve never seen a picture book that uses the language of comics before like plenty of middle grade books now do such as Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Big Nate. It actually makes a lot of sense for Willis since she also writes graphic novels, so if there’s anyone who can get innovative, it’s her. I actually considered doing the same thing with one of my own personal projects until I decided to make it a graphic novel for younger readers, primarily because I wasn’t sure if it could work, so I appreciate Willis showing me that it can work. Willis even goes so far as to make spreads entirely consisting of word balloons as the text, which was really cool to see.
The montage of Little Ghost trying to have fun at the party was funny (couldn’t he have fazed through the s’mores like he did the kickball? Maybe not). But the experience changes him enough to the point that he wants to have his own birthday party. He picks his own birth date (which admittedly does a good job at circumventing the gravestone suggestion). But he has trouble deciding what he wants the theme of his party to be, since he loves Halloween-themed stuff and figures it’s weird to celebrate anything Halloween-related during the summer. That’s when his mother suggests that he simply celebrates what speaks the most to him. And although the mother wears sunglasses and a hat earlier in the story, the regular glasses are much funnier in how simple it is, which I assume is her default design.
I like what Little Ghost ultimately opts to do, suggesting that more intimate moments with others was what mattered to him more than anything else. He bakes a cake with Anya that looks amazing. But then his mother suggests he head outside, which leads to a reveal that comes out of nowhere. At first, I didn’t get it, until I looked again at Anya’s (adorable) grin as they head outside and the lines coming from her and Little Ghost’s mother, and it occurred to me that they had been plotting this reveal for Little Ghost that was supposed to come out of nowhere. It was subtle enough for me to be just as surprised as Little Ghost, which was pretty neat.
Little Ghost excitedly blurts out the phrase “Summerween”, which he seemed to have come up with on a whim, not knowing it was an actual thing. But then again, the kids whom the book is targeted to likely didn’t know what Summerween was beforehand either (I certainly didn’t). The point seems to be that the reader discovers what Summerween is through Little Ghost’s experiences, and it was handled pretty well. And I also really like what Willis does with the endpapers. The front endpaper shows Little Ghost and his mother hanging out at their pool by themselves, while the back endpaper shows Anya and her mother joining them. It suggests that they linger at the pool long after the festivities are over, which was a beautifully clever way of using the endpapers to tell the story before the story and the story after the story.
Ultimately, Little Ghost’s Summerween is a cute and simple, yet effective and innovative story about staying true to yourself even for things as small as a party. It shows how you shouldn’t have to worry about expressing the truest version of yourself if you think that the context doesn’t suit the situation, that throwing a party is more about the time you spend with those closest to you than the festivities themselves, and how those closest to you can help assure you that there was nothing to worry about to begin with. This book will absolutely serve as a perfect introduction to Summerween for kids, and it could even give them ideas on how to celebrate it, in a way that’s more fun than if they discovered it through an article on the Internet. It definitely got me interested in the Little Ghost series as a whole and it certainly makes me want to check out Little Ghost Makes a Friend next, as well as Little Ghost’s Valentines when it comes out later this year. It will be interesting to see how many more installments we get, and the possibilities are rich. A Christmas book? A Thanksgiving book? A St. Patrick’s Day book? That last idea would particularly excite me since I was born on St. Patrick’s Day. But whichever holidays Little Ghost and Anya navigate together, I’ll be here for it!
So, what did you think of my review? Will you be checking out Little Ghost’s Summerween? I will be posting an edited version of my review of the book to my Goodreads shortly. Do you have a children’s book that is about to be released? You can send me an advance reading copy of your book (preferably electronic) for me to leave a review on or after the book’s release date in a future blog post. You can also send me the book’s cover for me to promote it on my Instagram, Threads, Twitter and Bluesky before its release date. Check the Contact page for more information. Be aware that I prefer to review middle grade, traditionally published books and books NOT created using artificial intelligence, and even then, I may not review every book I receive.
Until then, stay enlightened, educated and entertained, folks.
