Graciela in the Abyss

by Meg Medina, Anna Balbusso, Elena Balbusso

In Meg Medina’s illustrated fantasy, Graciela is a sea ghost whose existence beneath the ocean opens questions about life, death, memory, and connection. With atmospheric illustrations by Anna and Elena Balbusso, the story invites middle-grade readers to consider how relationships can bring meaning and change even to an unfamiliar world.

Big Idea

Writers control how readers experience uncertainty, connection, and change by alternating movement with reflection. Graciela’s underwater world offers a setting for exploring how language and illustration can make room for both suspense and difficult feelings.

Discussion Questions

1.How does being a sea ghost shape Graciela’s experiences and relationships? What parts of her experience still feel recognizably human?
2.Where does Graciela’s underwater world feel welcoming, unsettling, or both? How do Medina’s language and the Balbusso sisters’ illustrations create those responses?
3.Choose a moment when a relationship affects Graciela. What changes in her words, actions, or understanding, and what evidence supports your interpretation?
4.Where did you read quickly, and where did you slow down? How did those changes affect what you noticed or felt?
5.What does the story suggest about holding on and accepting change? How might two readers interpret its message differently?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 45 minutes📦 Copies of the book or legally shared selected passages and illustrations, paper, pencils, colored pencils or crayons, sticky notes, and a timer.

Learning Goals

Cite textual and visual evidence to explain how pacing shapes a reader’s response.
Analyze how the underwater setting influences atmosphere and Graciela’s experience.
Distinguish scene, summary, action, and reflection in narrative writing.
Revise sentence structure, detail, punctuation, and paragraphing to create contrasting narrative speeds.
Explain how an illustration can extend, complicate, or slow the reading of a passage.

Activity Steps

1.Read and notice — 7 minutes: Read a short encounter involving Graciela alongside an accompanying illustration. Students mark one place that feels quick and one that invites a pause, citing specific features.
2.Map the movement — 6 minutes: Identify what happens before, during, and after the encounter. Label moments of action, description, dialogue, and reflection that actually occur in the passage.
3.Build a storyboard — 10 minutes: Fold paper into six panels. Represent the encounter through sketches and brief captions, using panel size and detail to show where readers should linger or move quickly.
4.Write two speeds — 10 minutes: Choose one panel and write two short adaptations of its moment. Accelerate one through selective detail and compressed action; slow the other through sensory observation or reflection.
5.Read and revise — 7 minutes: Partners read the versions aloud, identify the intended pace, and suggest one purposeful revision. Writers check that adaptations preserve the original event.
6.Reflect — 5 minutes: Students explain which version better fits the selected moment and support their decision with one detail from the book and one choice from their own writing.

Standards Connections

ELA: CCSS RL.5.1, RL.6.1, RL.7.1, RL.8.1 — Cite evidence when explaining explicit meaning and drawing inferences.
ELA: CCSS RL.5.3, RL.6.3, RL.7.3, RL.8.3 — Analyze characters, events, and interactions among story elements at the appropriate grade level.
ELA: CCSS W.5.3d, W.6.3d, W.7.3d, W.8.3d — Use precise language, relevant details, and sensory language in narrative writing.
ELA: CCSS SL.5.1, SL.6.1, SL.7.1, SL.8.1 — Participate effectively in collaborative discussions.
Visual literacy and SEL — Interpret how images contribute to meaning; consider different emotional responses without requiring personal disclosure.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

In Graciela in the Abyss, an underwater ghost story becomes an opportunity to study how writers make unfamiliar experiences emotionally accessible. Begin with the contrast between the strangeness of Graciela’s situation and the recognizable feelings readers find in her responses and relationships. Ask students not merely what happens, but how much reading time Medina gives an event, an observation, or a feeling. A brief action can occupy an extended passage; a longer stretch of experience can be compressed into a few lines. The Pace-Write-Read workshop treats pacing as a relationship among language, structure, illustration, and reader attention. Students should test their impressions against selected passages: Does a description suspend forward movement? Does dialogue bring an encounter into the immediate present? Do the Balbusso sisters’ images encourage readers to linger over something the prose treats briefly? Short sentences do not automatically mean fast pacing, and an illustration is not simply a pause; both depend on context. Use the forty lenses below as a menu across several readings rather than a checklist for one lesson. Each investigation should move from noticing to evidence to a small writing experiment. Because the book involves death and loss, let students discuss Graciela and the fictional world without asking them to share personal bereavements. For features that may not occur in a selected passage—such as flash-forwards or lists—students should establish whether the feature is present before discussing its effect.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
1. Pacing	Choose an active moment involving Graciela and a more reflective passage. Compare how much happens with how much space the telling occupies, then explain the resulting sense of speed.
2. Plot	Map a sequence in which Graciela’s situation or understanding changes. Separate events that alter the story’s direction from passages that deepen readers’ understanding without advancing events.
3. Prosody	Read a short passage about Graciela’s underwater experience aloud twice, varying stress, phrasing, and pauses. Use the wording and punctuation to decide which performance best supports its mood.
4. Word	Collect several verbs and descriptive words from a passage set beneath the sea. Test replacements and discuss how their sound, precision, and associations change the movement or atmosphere.
5. Concept	Use the idea of a sea ghost to distinguish a story’s premise from its plot. Ask how Medina introduces the unfamiliar concept while giving readers reasons to care about Graciela.
6. Voice & Worldview	Examine how the narration presents Graciela’s ghostly existence: which details seem ordinary within her world, and which are treated as remarkable? Discuss how that framing guides readers’ attitudes.
7. Point of View	Identify the narrative perspective using pronouns and evidence of whose thoughts readers can access. Explain how access to—or distance from—Graciela’s inner experience influences uncertainty and empathy.
8. Setting & Place	Track how depth, light, movement, and other details establish the underwater setting in words and pictures. Ask which details affect what Graciela can experience, rather than serving only as background.
9. Original Characters	List qualities that make Graciela an individual rather than simply an example of a ghost. Examine how a distinctive response or choice reveals character without requiring a long explanation.
10. Dialogue	Choose an exchange involving Graciela and compare what the speakers say with accompanying actions or narration. Discuss whether the exchange speeds events, delays an answer, or creates an emotional pause.
11. Details	Select three concrete details from one underwater passage and explain what each contributes to setting, character, or mood. Remove one experimentally to see what the reader loses.
12. Descriptions	Compare a descriptive passage with its nearby action. Ask whether the description interrupts movement, prepares readers for what follows, or makes Graciela’s experience more immediate.
13. Firsts	Study Graciela’s first introduction and the first appearance of another important figure. Identify what readers learn immediately and what the author leaves unresolved.
14. Immediacy & Engagement	Find a passage that makes readers feel close to Graciela’s present experience. Identify whether action, sensory information, a question, or emotional uncertainty creates that closeness.
15. Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Mark a fully developed encounter and a passage that compresses experience or provides background. Discuss why Medina gives these parts of Graciela’s story different amounts of narrative space.
16. Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Separate concern for Graciela from curiosity about her world: what do readers fear, and what do they want to understand? Track where the text supplies an answer or changes an expectation.
17. Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Check the selected section for a shift in story time or an unresolved ending rather than assuming these devices appear. If a memory or reference to another time occurs, explain how it affects attention to Graciela’s present.
18. Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Examine an actual page or section ending in the classroom edition. Ask whether readers turn onward because of an unanswered question, an emotional change, or the promise of a new scene.
19. Pace & Creativity	Rewrite one moment involving Graciela with a different distribution of action and reflection. Compare how changing its pace changes the interpretation, even when the event remains the same.
20. Play	Invite students to experiment with underwater movement words while preserving the atmosphere of a selected passage. Discuss when playful sound or phrasing supports the scene and when it distracts from its emotional stakes.
21. Performance	Stage a brief reader’s-theater version of an encounter involving Graciela, keeping the source language intact. Let pauses, vocal shifts, and stillness reveal pacing without adding dramatic events.
22. Personality	Compare Graciela’s responses in two situations and identify a consistent trait or a meaningful change. Ask how quickly an action can communicate something that explanation would take longer to establish.
23. Humor	Invite students to locate any moment they genuinely find amusing, surprising, or gently incongruous. If humor is not evident, discuss how the selected section sustains interest without comic relief.
24. Pause	Find a place where outward action slows while readers attend to Graciela’s perception or feeling. Explain why that pause matters to the surrounding events.
25. Poetry / Poetic Devices	Look for figurative language or sound patterns in descriptions of the sea and Graciela’s experience. Name only devices supported by the wording, then explain how they affect mood and reading speed.
26. Repetition	Track a repeated word, image, or idea across selected sections. Ask whether its meaning changes as readers learn more about Graciela, rather than treating every recurrence as simple emphasis.
27. Rhythm	Compare sentence lengths and patterns in an active passage and a reflective one. Read both aloud to test how their rhythms shape readers’ experience of the underwater world.
28. Punctuation	Annotate the punctuation in a short passage involving Graciela. Experiment with one change and explain its effect on phrasing, emphasis, or the relationship between ideas.
29. Questions	Keep a reader’s question log about Graciela and the rules of her world. Distinguish questions the text answers promptly from those it allows readers to carry forward.
30. Compare-Contrast	Compare Graciela’s responses in two encounters or compare the atmosphere of two underwater scenes. Explain how the contrast makes a change in emotion or pace noticeable.
31. Objects	Choose a concrete object actually present in the text or an illustration. Trace what Graciela’s attention to it reveals, and distinguish an evidence-based symbolic interpretation from a guess.
32. Threes	Check a passage or illustration for a genuine three-part sequence, cluster, or pattern. If none appears, create an original three-beat description inspired by the setting and label it as a writing experiment.
33. Lists	Look for an accumulation of details in a description of Graciela’s surroundings, whether or not it forms a formal list. Test how adding or removing items changes density and pace.
34. White Space & Negative Space	Inspect an illustrated page for paragraph breaks, margins, and open areas around figures. Discuss how textual white space and visual negative space can guide attention without assuming every edition has identical pagination.
35. Art & Graphics	Compare a Balbusso sisters illustration with the nearby prose. Explain how composition, color, scale, or light contributes something beyond a literal restatement of Graciela’s situation.
36. Interactives & Gamification	Use a teacher-created evidence hunt in which students locate a pacing shift, a revealing detail, and an image-text connection. Make clear that this is a classroom strategy, not a claim that the book contains game mechanics.
37. Placement	Examine where an important detail about Graciela appears within a paragraph, scene, or illustrated sequence. Ask how moving it earlier or later would change expectation or emphasis.
38. Form	Study how prose and illustration share the work of telling this ghost story. Discuss what readers would lose if either the language or the images were removed.
39. Dummy	Create a miniature book mock-up for a student-written adaptation of one short moment involving Graciela. Plan where text, images, and page turns will go, labeling it as a new design rather than a reconstruction of the published book.
40. Passion	Ask students which question about Graciela’s experience most sustains their interest. Connect that investment to a specific craft choice, while distinguishing a reader’s interpretation from a claim about the creators’ private intentions.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute Pace-Write-It! task: One Underwater Moment, Two Speeds. Before class, select a short passage in which Graciela encounters another character or responds to something in her underwater surroundings, ideally near an illustration. Minutes 0–4: Read it together and identify the event, one setting detail, and Graciela’s observable response. Minutes 4–6: Mark one feature that accelerates the telling and one that encourages readers to linger; consult the illustration for a visual counterpart. Minutes 6–12: Students write two 40–60-word adaptations of the same moment, preserving its central event. The first compresses background and emphasizes immediate action; the second expands a text-supported perception through sensory detail or reflection. Students label any invented interior thought as an inference, not a quotation or established fact. Minutes 12–17: Partners read both aloud and identify which feels faster, citing two specific writing choices rather than sentence length alone. Minutes 17–20: Each writer revises one sentence and completes an exit ticket: 'For this moment in Graciela’s story, I would choose the ___ version because ___. My pacing choice helps the reader notice ___.' Offer the option to focus on setting rather than death or loss.

Classroom Activities

A Moment Beneath the Surface

Students build a six-panel pacing storyboard inspired by Graciela’s underwater world. Using a teacher-selected encounter from the book, they map how action, sensory detail, reflection, and illustration shape the reading experience, then write two versions of one moment: one swift and suspenseful, the other slow and reflective. Students should use the actual passage for character and event details rather than inventing additions to the plot.

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