Readers of Perrotta’s previous books may be surprised to find that not a lot happens in Ghost Town ... Mostly a character portrait. As if he feels self-conscious about the lack of narrative momentum, Perrotta sprinkles ominous notes throughout the novel ... Universal sentiments and they underscore why the brisk, resonant Ghost Town might be Perrotta’s best book. I’ve enjoyed all of his novels, but it feels like he has pared this one down to its essence, which is beautiful and true: how we stay connected to the people we’ve lost and how we learn to move on.
Jimmy’s time with Olivia, featuring séances and make-out sessions, recaptures that 'distinctive and weird' magic present in Perrotta’s earlier fiction, and introduces a supernatural element to the novel that’s only committed to fitfully. It would have been fun to see Perrotta embrace that ghostly angle more robustly, particularly because much of the rest of the novel consists of watered-down takes on a story that’s been told many times and better, including by Perrotta ... Cliched ... Perrotta clearly enjoys revisiting his fictionalized childhood, but this time around, he’s the one who’s lost the wonder, the one who seems afraid of provoking too strong a reaction, and a ghost town that doesn’t make you feel even a little uncomfortable is just emptiness.
Glancingly confronting themes of artistic integrity and abandonment, including self-abandonment, and unfolding mostly in flashbacks to the early 1970s, Ghost Town is a formulaic coming-of-age tale swirled in soft-serve spook ... The result is less penny dreadful than mild freaky-deaky. Your spine will not be chilled, nor even remotely cooled ... he adults in this book are chalk outlines. Unpleasant topics — estrangement, architectural eyesores, drinking problems — are whispered in italics ... Does Ghost Town stink like the Oscar the Grouch garbage cans in downtown Creamwood? Nah. It has the practiced Perrotta polish; an easy shrug about how it will be received or remembered.
Drops deeper into Perrotta’s well of woe than he’s gone before. It’s a novel about grief — not the kind of grief you bend your life around but the kind so traumatic that you wall it off like a nuclear waste site, a place to be forgotten and avoided forever ... This is Perrotta at his finest, working in that cramped space between crying and laughing. He has a keen eye for those rituals of bereavement that provide meager direction to adults and leave a 13-year-old boy utterly baffled about what he should think, say, or do ... If you know Perrotta’s work, you know how effectively he can give motion to the suspended life of sorrow ... The ending is an absolute wallop, a tragedy hidden in the grass so subtly that no adolescent could have seen it coming, and no adult could ever survive it intact.
Perrotta elevates what could be a standard coming-of-age adventure with sly twists, leading to an ambiguous conclusion that will be alluring fodder for book groups.
Tender ... This insightful novel about adolescence, grief, and the lifelong project of reconciling past and present is a solid buy for fiction collections.
Perrotta, who’s known for edgy satires...creates a very different mood here: melancholy, moving, dark, redolent with regret and loss. His sharp characterizations and social observations serve to bemuse rather than amuse this time, but as he builds to a shocking climax, it turns out he’s just as good at that. Maybe you can go home again, but do you really want to? An atmospheric elegy to innocence lost.
