THE MISSING PAGES

Historical fiction entwining the fate of a bereaved Harvard student and the late Harry Elkins Widener.

Harvard’s Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library was endowed by his mother in memory of her son, who was just 27 years old when he went down, along with his father, on the Titanic. Lore has it that he parted from his mother in the lifeboat to go back to his stateroom for a priceless book; Richman’s tale grows out of her notion that this was not the real reason. Oh yay, another doomed love story on the Titanic! To wend her fictional way to that watery heartbreak, the author has invented a lonely Harvard junior named Violet Hutchins, who gets a job as a page at the Widener in 1992, the fall after her boyfriend, Hugo, drowns while they are out for a swim, and also breathes life back into Harry Widener himself, now a spirit who lives in his eponymous library and uses his considerable ghostly powers to set Violet on the trail of a story no one has ever known, the story of his secret love. “The one thing a ghost learns rather quickly is that the living fail to appreciate subtlety when it comes to receiving otherworldly communications,” Harry says, before chucking books off the shelf and filling the air with the scent of his pipe tobacco to get Violet’s attention. Richman also weaves in the true story of vandalism at the Widener in the 1990s, blame for which shifts toward poor Violet, who’s making everyone nervous with her Ouija board and her growing interest in communicating with the dead. The progress of her investigation unfolds in tandem with Harry’s account of his doomed love, moving more slowly than would be ideal, but finally snapping together as one thought they might. The novel has a YA feel and indeed might be shared with a history-minded young reader.

A pleasantly bookish ghost story.