Fans of the satires of Tom Perrotta (Tracy Flick Can't Win) will find a different but equally rich experience in Ghost Town, a novel about trauma that includes a hint of the supernatural. Jay Perry is a successful novelist and creator of an animated kids' show based on his Ghost Teacher novels. He lives in Los Angeles but grew up in 1970s New Jersey. The current mayor of his Creamwood, N.J., hometown invites Jay to a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a municipal building named for his father. But Jay is reluctant to return and keen to forget a time when he was 13-year-old Jimmy Perrini and his mother died from lung cancer, "a sucker punch from a bright blue sky."
Perrotta presents the events of that summer of 1974 with infectious sincerity. He describes Jimmy's volunteer firefighter dad, "the kind of guy who played softball with a stubby Dutch Masters cigar jutting from the corner of his mouth," as well as other Creamwood residents, all of them white, a factor that comes into play when "hippie cousin Wayne" moves in next door with his olive-skinned wife. Add to the mix Jimmy's friendship with Eddie, "a stringy-haired burnout" with shady associates, and Olivia, a high school valedictorian who says her Ouija board will let Jimmy chat with his mom, and the result is an endearing if troubling portrait of small-town America. A gift for breezy prose helps material like this go down easily; Perrotta demonstrates that gift in this heartfelt work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer