Taxi Ghost : (a Graphic Novel)

by Sophie Escabasse

During a snowy winter break in Montreal, Adèle discovers that she can see ghosts—and that some spirits use unsuspecting living people as transportation. Although her grandmother wants her to avoid the spirit world, Adèle becomes involved with ghosts whose troubles connect her to questions about family, friendship, and the future of her neighborhood.

Big Idea

Listening to people whose experiences are overlooked can change how we understand a community and our responsibility to it. Graphic storytelling shows how words, pictures, and pacing work together to make those perspectives visible.

Discussion Questions

1.How does Adèle’s attitude toward ghosts change as she gets to know them? Which encounters help explain that change?
2.Why might Adèle and her grandmother respond so differently to the spirit world? How can we understand both perspectives without agreeing with every decision?
3.What do the ghosts help Adèle notice about Montreal that she might otherwise overlook? Whose stories help make a place a community?
4.Choose a sequence in which the pictures reveal something the dialogue does not say. How does that visual information affect your understanding of the characters?
5.How does Sophie Escabasse balance funny supernatural situations with serious questions about belonging and neighborhood change? What does the humor make possible?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 50 minutes📦 Copies of the book, paper or six-panel comic templates, pencils, erasers, crayons or colored pencils, sticky notes

Learning Goals

Explain how Adèle’s encounters with ghosts develop themes of empathy, belonging, and community.
Analyze how panel arrangement, dialogue, and silent images influence reading pace.
Create a coherent comic scene with a beginning, a turning point, and a response.
Use visual details and dialogue to communicate different character perspectives.
Revise a comic after hearing how a partner reads its pacing.

Activity Steps

1.Revisit a short sequence involving Adèle and a ghost. Identify what Adèle wants, what the ghost wants, and what the pictures contribute beyond the words.
2.Invent a ghost, a Montreal destination, and a reason that place matters to the ghost. Distinguish these invented details from established facts in the book.
3.Plan six panels: an unexpected request, Adèle’s reaction, movement through the city, a quiet look at the destination, the ghost’s explanation, and Adèle’s response.
4.Draw and letter the comic. Use three compact panels for a quick exchange and one larger or less crowded panel to slow readers at an important moment.
5.Exchange comics with a partner. Partners identify where they sped up, paused, or changed their understanding of the ghost; creators revise one pacing choice.
6.Share selected comics and complete an exit statement: 'I helped readers understand the ghost by …'

Standards Connections

ELA: CCSS RL.3.3–RL.7.3 — Grade-appropriate analysis of characters, events, and their interactions.
ELA: CCSS RL.3.7 and RL.5.7 — Explain how illustrations or visual elements contribute to meaning, tone, or the reading experience.
ELA: CCSS W.3.3–W.7.3 — Write narratives using descriptive details, dialogue, and purposeful event sequences.
ELA: CCSS SL.3.1–SL.7.1 — Participate in collaborative discussions and build on others’ ideas.
SEL and Visual Arts: Perspective-taking, social awareness, and purposeful use of visual storytelling choices.

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

In Taxi Ghost, Sophie Escabasse makes pacing something readers can see. Adèle’s discovery of the spirit world brings surprise, comic interruptions, and moments that ask her—and the reader—to reconsider an initial judgment. Rather than measuring pace only by how much action occurs, students can examine how much attention a moment receives: a reaction, an exchange of dialogue, or a view of snowy Montreal can each change the experience of time. A Pace-Write-Read study begins with close looking. Students select a short sequence, notice how panels and speech balloons guide their eyes, and test different ways of reading its dialogue aloud. They then write and draw a small scene of their own, using Escabasse’s combination of expressive characters, supernatural humor, and community concerns as a craft model rather than copying her images or language. The central workshop question is: When should a storyteller hurry, and when should a storyteller ask us to stay? Younger students can explore this through panel size, facial expressions, and short speech balloons; older students can examine how pacing shifts a scene from a joke about an inconvenient ghost encounter to a more thoughtful encounter with another person’s history.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
Pacing	Compare an energetic ghost encounter with a quieter conversation involving Adèle. Ask how panel count, dialogue density, and reaction images influence the time readers spend in each moment; more panels do not automatically mean faster reading.
Plot	Trace how Adèle’s ability to see ghosts moves from an unexpected personal problem into involvement with other people’s concerns. Have students connect events with 'because' and 'therefore' rather than simply listing what happens.
Prosody	Read a conversation between Adèle and her grandmother aloud, using expressions and lettering as evidence for stress, pitch, and pauses. Compare two plausible deliveries and discuss how each changes the scene’s pace.
Word	Choose a short speech balloon from a ghost encounter and identify the word that carries its strongest emotion or surprise. In an original balloon, test how replacing one word changes both tone and reading speed.
Concept	Explore how the idea of ghosts using living people for transportation turns an ordinary trip into a story problem. Students invent one complication that logically follows from that supernatural premise.
Voice & Worldview	Compare what Adèle and her grandmother say about ghosts. Notice how their language communicates different assumptions about trust, risk, and responsibility.
Point of View	Consider how readers discover the ghost world alongside Adèle even when the images show more than she says aloud. Redraw an imagined encounter from a ghost’s visual perspective and discuss what becomes more important.
Setting & Place	Study how snow, streets, buildings, and neighborhood spaces establish Montreal as more than a backdrop. Ask how a ghost’s attachment to a location changes the meaning of that setting.
Original Characters	Identify how Escabasse distinguishes ghosts and living characters through appearance, posture, wants, and speech. Students design a new ghost with a particular connection to one neighborhood place rather than only a spooky appearance.
Dialogue	Examine how Adèle’s exchanges with ghosts deliver information while also showing irritation, curiosity, or concern. Ask students to write a brief exchange in which each speaker wants something different.
Details	Look for a small expression, gesture, or background feature that changes how a ghost encounter feels. Discuss why a carefully selected visual detail can replace a sentence of explanation.
Descriptions	Use a Montreal street panel to separate what the art describes from what the words explain. Students write a prose description of the panel, then decide which sentences would be unnecessary in a comic.
Firsts	Revisit Adèle’s early experiences of seeing ghosts and notice how the unfamiliar is introduced. Compare what readers need explained at first with what later scenes can assume they already understand.
Immediacy & Engagement	Study how an unexpected ghost presence interrupts Adèle’s ordinary experience. Students begin their own scene with a visible interruption instead of a paragraph explaining the entire ghost world.
Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Distinguish moments presented through sustained conversation and action from transitions that move readers onward. Ask why a conversation that changes Adèle’s understanding deserves more space than a routine journey.
Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Separate surprise at seeing a ghost from suspense about what Adèle will do next. Track how an encounter becomes more consequential when a ghost’s concern connects to the neighborhood’s future.
Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	When a ghost discusses the past, distinguish a character’s recollection from an actual visual flashback. As a transfer exercise, students create an optional flashback panel or cliffhanger for their invented scene without claiming the book uses every device.
Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Examine what readers know immediately before and after a selected page turn. Ask whether the turn delivers a reveal, changes location, or gives a reaction extra emphasis.
Pace & Creativity	Use Adèle’s competing demands—ordinary life and unexpected ghost requests—to generate different tempos. Students sketch the same invented request as a rapid comic interruption and as a slow, uneasy discovery.
Play	Explore the playful mismatch between familiar city travel and supernatural passengers. Invite students to invent a funny practical problem while keeping the ghost’s feelings believable.
Performance	Perform a short Adèle-and-ghost exchange with a narrator describing essential visual actions. Add a silent beat for a facial expression and discuss what is lost if performers rush past it.
Personality	Compare how Adèle, her grandmother, and a selected ghost react to an inconvenience. Show how distinctive reactions reveal personality more efficiently than labels such as 'kind' or 'grumpy.'
Humor	Look for contrasts between the extraordinary presence of ghosts and the practical way characters respond. Identify how the setup, reaction, and timing create humor without requiring a separate narrated joke.
Pause	Find a panel in which an expression or view invites readers to linger. Students add a wordless pause after their invented ghost reveals why a destination matters.
Poetry / Poetic Devices	Explore the contrast between Montreal’s living residents and its lingering spirits as a source of imagery and metaphor, without treating the book as verse. Students write one original image-rich caption inspired by a snowy street scene.
Repetition	Look for recurring kinds of encounters, reactions, or visual contrasts as Adèle becomes familiar with ghosts. Ask how a repeated situation feels different once her understanding has changed.
Rhythm	Follow the alternating beats of speech, reaction, movement, and silence in a selected sequence. Represent those beats with marks, then compare the pattern with a quieter scene.
Punctuation	Inspect punctuation in an actual conversation before deciding how to read it aloud. Students test how a question mark, exclamation point, or unfinished sentence changes the delivery of their own ghost dialogue.
Questions	Track the questions Adèle has when she first encounters ghosts and how those questions become more informed. End an invented panel with a genuine unanswered question that gives readers a reason to continue.
Compare-Contrast	Compare Adèle’s and her grandmother’s approaches to the spirit world using both dialogue and images. Discuss how placing contrasting reactions close together can communicate disagreement quickly.
Objects	Select a visible object in a home or street scene and consider what it establishes about daily life or place. In an original scene, make one object meaningful to a ghost without presenting that invented significance as a fact from the book.
Threes	Test a three-beat structure using the book’s premise: a ghost requests a ride, Adèle reacts, and the ghost adds an unexpected complication. Treat this as a writing experiment rather than an assumed recurring pattern in the novel.
Lists	Create a planning list of what Adèle must manage during an imagined ghost encounter: destination, interruption, and competing obligation. Discuss how presenting the items separately might feel different from crowding them into one balloon.
White Space & Negative Space	Study gutters, uncluttered areas, and the space around characters in a selected sequence. Ask how these spaces separate moments or focus attention, rather than assuming every empty area means a long pause.
Art & Graphics	Analyze how expressive faces, body language, and the visual presentation of ghosts help readers understand encounters before reading every balloon. Students identify one meaning that depends on the art.
Interactives & Gamification	Use a classroom 'ghost route' challenge in which pairs sequence invented encounter cards and justify where to place a reveal or pause. Explain that this is a teaching game inspired by Taxi Ghost, not an interactive feature of the book.
Placement	Trace how balloon order and character placement guide the eye through a conversation. Students check that their own Adèle-and-ghost scene can be read in the intended order without verbal instructions.
Form	Compare one encounter as a comic with a short prose retelling. Discuss how simultaneous visual information, separated panels, and reader-controlled pauses shape the graphic novel’s storytelling.
Dummy	Make a rough folded-paper mock-up of an imagined additional scene before producing finished art. Move the ghost’s important explanation across a page turn and test how that changes anticipation.
Passion	Ask what Adèle’s growing willingness to listen suggests she cares about, and support interpretations with specific moments. Students choose a place they care about to give their invented ghost’s request emotional purpose.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute Pace-Write-It! task: 'A Ride Worth Slowing Down For.' Minutes 0–3: Revisit a brief ghost encounter and identify one quick exchange and one reaction worth lingering over. Minutes 3–6: Invent a ghost asking Adèle for transportation to a meaningful Montreal location; decide what Adèle initially misunderstands and what the ghost will reveal. Minutes 6–13: Draft a four-panel imagined scene: request, quick response, arrival, and revelation. Keep the first two panels brisk, then slow the final moment with a larger image, fewer words, or a silent reaction. Minutes 13–17: Exchange work with a partner, who traces the reading path and marks where they paused; revise one balloon or panel choice. Minutes 17–20: Share revisions and finish: 'My pacing helps readers move from ___ to ___.' For grades 3–4, offer panel templates and allow dictated dialogue; for grades 5–7, ask students to explain how their pacing changes the reader’s judgment of the ghost.

Classroom Activities

One Ride, Two Perspectives

Students create an original six-panel comic imagining a short encounter between Adèle and a ghost seeking a ride through snowy Montreal. The ghost needs more than transportation: someone must listen to a concern about a place that matters to them. Students use a fast sequence, a deliberate pause, and a visual reveal to move from comic inconvenience toward empathy. This is an imagined additional scene, not a reconstruction of an episode from the book.

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