Published by Scribner on April 28, 2026
“When you’re thirteen, you don’t know what to think or who to believe.” Ghost Town is the sad coming-of-age story of a 13-year-old whose mother has just died. Adults assure him that his mother is in heaven but “it felt fake — too good to be true — like a story adults had invented to make children feel better and ended up believing themselves.”
The story lives in the memory of Jimmy Perrini, who thinks back to a fateful summer in 1974. One of Jimmy’s teachers is a far-right bigot whose brother died in Vietnam. He won’t tolerate any dissent about the war and has no use for hippies or nonwhite people in Creamwood, New Jersey. Jimmy has no experience with people of color until Wayne, his hippie cousin, moves into the house next door with his mixed wife Nilda and her Black cousin Hector.
Intermittent returns to 2024 reveal that Jimmy is now best known as Jay Perry, an author who was experiencing declining sales for his literary novels before writing a successful YA series that turned into an even more successful television show for kids. With some trepidation, he returns to Creamwood to attend an event honoring his father. He makes the trip because he is tired of denying the past. “It felt like I was finally ready to face up to it, to reclaim those missing years, the world I’d left behind.” He is surprised by how racially diverse the town has become in his absence.
The 1974 story gets moving after Jimmy becomes overwhelmed after hearing his mother’s voice at her funeral. As he flees from the funeral home, Eddie Fitzpatrick pulls up in his Chevy Vega and offers Jimmy a ride. A bit younger than Jimmy’s sister Denise, Eddie does little that summer except smoke pot and cruise the streets, occasionally making unsuccessful attempts to impress girls.
Jimmy and Eddie begin to cruise the town regularly, always in the evening, and Jimmy eventually accepts Eddie’s offer to take some hits from his joints. Jimmy enjoys being high and indulges regularly after that first experience. Jimmy adopts a routine of riding with Eddie until he concludes that the Vega is haunted by the ghost of its original owner.
Jimmy knows his mother would have grounded him “for the rest of his life if she’d found out that he was smoking pot with a high school kid and staying out way past his curfew. But that was the thing— she wasn’t alive anymore and the rules were different now.” His father is a firefighter who, lost in his own world after his wife’s death, never keeps his promises to spend more time with Jimmy and devotes little effort to supervising him.
Jimmy has a not-quite girlfriend named Janie, but while he was away from school in the week after his mother’s death, Janie began to date his best friend Greg. When Janie’s family leaves for the summer, her friend Olivia offers to use her Ouija board to help Jimmy communicate with his mother. They make contact with a spirit (or so it seems to Jimmy) but it isn’t Jimmy’s mother. A later Ouija board sessions summons still a different ghost.
Although Olivia is two years older and six inches taller than Jimmy, she quickly inspires him to forget about Janie. A fleeting sexual experience — Jimmy’s first of any significance — enlivens the plot until he hears his mother’s voice, causing him to flee from Olivia just as he fled from his mother’s funeral. Whether the admonishing voice comes from Jimmy’s dead mother or his conscience is for the reader to decide, as is the real or imagined appearance of his mother’s ghost as the story nears its end. Jimmy might not believe in heaven, but he comes to believe in the enduring power of his mother’s love.
In addition to its flirtation with the spirit world, race relations are a dominant theme. Creamwood is a white community and many of its residents want it to stay that way. Eddie’s pot dealer, a loser who has no moral authority to judge anyone else, is one of those. He is particularly antagonistic to Hector, despite Hector’s generous nature and friendly demeanor. That animosity appears to play a role in the novel’s defining moment.
Ghost Town is a low-key novel that underplays its climax. It always seems that the story will lead to an eventful moment (because that’s what coming-of-age stories do), but it isn’t clear what that moment will be until it happens. The life-changing event is dramatic, but the reader learns little of its immediate impact on Jimmy because he repressed the memory. In the novel’s final pages, having returned to Creamwood fifty years later, Jimmy finally makes sense of it as best he can.
Like the movie American Graffiti, Ghost Town creates a sense of nostalgia for a lost time, a youthful summer of cars and shifting friendships and doomed love. Ghost Town takes a darker tone, however, in its depiction of Creamwood as a community that is hostile to social progress. Some of this understandably goes over the head of 13-year-old Jimmy, while the adult version of himself is pleased that small-minded residents of his childhood home could not stand in the way of progressive change.
Ghost Town evokes a mixture of sweet and sad emotions. Still, it doesn’t stand apart from other coming-of-age novels that have covered the same ground. Perrotta pushes all the right buttons, but I can’t say that he achieves anything new or particularly memorable. The appearance of Jimmy's mother's ghost at the novel's end is a bit sappy, although plenty of readers will appreciate the sap. The novel has enough strong moments to earn a recommendation, but its familiarity robs it of emotional resonance.
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