“They were ghosts, after all, and happy endings don’t haunt anyone.”
Francesca Serritella’s Ghosts of Harvard (Random House 2020) is a rather ambitious work that suffers from trying to do too much. There’s a lot of good things, but the ghost story, mental health awareness, and political thriller don’t always mesh that nicely in the novel – all three areas, which could have been strong backbones for the novel, suffer from sacrificing to the others.
Cadence Arthur’s brother, a brilliant student at Harvard, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and dies by suicide on campus. He was a research assistant for a prominent (and beautiful) professor whose work was top secret and protected by the Department of Defense. He continued to work with her as his illness, in particular the paranoia, worsened. Months later, Cadence, still cloaked in grief and guilt, enrolls as a freshman at Harvard – intent on finding what pushed her brother over the edge – figuratively and possibly literally. She begins hearing voices and begins to question her own sanity.
The ghost stories are my favorite – clearly Cady is chasing the ghost of her brother, but while doing so, she encounters the ghosts of a Harvard slave and two students. All three help her, and she attempts to help them. She falls in love with one, but that isn’t fully explored and seems more of a plot device to make her relationship with another character a bit more palatable.
In addition to these ghosts that protect, guide, and even do her homework for her, Cady is attempting to decode the notebook left by her brother. Growing up, they’d created their own code and her brother would leave her missions to complete in the code. She sees this as her final mission. But is the mission born of his paranoia or was he really on to something that put him at risk? The ghosts pretty much disappear when the political thriller takes over. It reads with a madness that, if intentional, was genius – I just wish it had been more genre-blurring than genre-jumping.
It’s an interesting read, but it was just okay for me. I really wanted to like it more than I did; there was so much potential with the ghost of the Harvard slave.
A Girl Named Tommi 