Reviews
Reviews:
From Minnesota Monthly:
"Vivid descriptions bring to life the crowded Hertzel home, a gray clapboard character with a creepy basement book room, 10-foot drafty ceilings, and a glitchy front door lock. While the book-propelling tension of an impending death lurks in the dark, dusty corners of the house on Fourth Street, there are brighter anecdotes. When Hertzel isn't vying for space in the bedroom she shares with three of her sisters, she hides in the bathroom to read in peace, glimpses Lake Superior from an attic dormer window, and bakes Nestlé chocolate chip cookies on windy wintry nights."
Read the full review here: Minnesota Monthly review
From the Rockdale Newton Citizen:
"As you read this book, you may often see your own childhood. You might feel as if author Laurie Hertzel plucked your memories from your head. ... This book is the consummate Baby Boomer memoir, one that you'll finish, then turn around and read again. ... 'Ghosts of Fourth Street' is a story you'll remember."
From Book Reporter:
"The book excels by letting us into the secrets and stories that make up a family's history --- and by sharing alongside us in the pain of a loss that alters that history forever. It's both a commonplace tale and a remarkable one --- and certainly will prompt readers' reflections on the 'empty spaces we fill with stories' in our own lives and those of our families."
Read the full review here: Book reporter review
Review from the Springfield News:
"Laurie Hertzel is a book reviewer I admire. When I heard about her memoir, 'Ghosts of Fourth Street — My Family, a Death, and the Hills of Duluth,' I felt compelled to read it because someone who spent her life writing about them might write one heck of a book. She doesn't disappoint. .... Families can be tricky. This is a powerful book."
Read the full review here: Springfield News
From Irish Arts Minnesota:
From Mankato Magazine:
Pre-pub blurbs:
Mary Ann Grossmann, St. Paul Pioneer Press:
"If you are thinking about writing memoir or creative nonfiction, consider Laurie Hertzel's memoir your textbook. ... This involving story is both tender and amusing.... Read 'Ghosts of Fourth Street' for Hertzel's way with storytelling and for getting to know her colorful family." Dec. 14, 2025, Sec. E page 4
Kirkus:
A large, unhappy Minnesota family endures an unthinkable tragedy.
As the seventh of 10 children, little Laurie Jo was "a watcher more than a doer"—and she grew up, naturally enough, to be a journalist. But "[w]hat I have written here is not journalism," she tells us. "It is not the story any of my siblings would tell." If they would tell it at all, that is, for the drowning death of her oldest brother, Bobby, in 1966 was immediately cloaked in silence. In her version, the author deftly accesses a child's-eye quality of observation to illuminate and sweeten the account of a midcentury Midwestern childhood that was often cold and dark, both literally and figuratively. As she points out, "Large families create their own societies, with their own rules and cliques and punishments. In our family, there were three groups: the Big Kids, the Three Little Kids, and, between them, me, a clique unto myself." Though theirs was "a house of chaos," the Hertzels were never a jolly, rambunctious Cheaper by the Dozen-type ensemble—the unhappiness of both parents, the superstitiousness and rigidity of the family culture, and even the freezing, snowy Duluth winters combined to keep a lid on spirits. In fact, one of the few times anyone really laughs in the book is in its final scene, where Laurie and her little brother, Evan, are baking cookies in one of the deadly quiet evenings that followed Bobby's demise. "Everyone else was upstairs, behind closed doors, as far away as they could be, or gone. The floorboards above our heads creaked, the walls cracked from the cold outside; sometimes it felt as if the entire house was going to fly apart. The wind moaned in the chimney like ghosts." The pair work themselves into an uncontrollable fit of giggles reading limericks and pretending to be spies from a favorite novel, striking a note of hope and light among the ghosts.
The wide-eyed, endearing little girl at the heart of this tale movingly shows us how children metabolize loss.
Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9781517920784
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
"Laurie Hertzel lifts the trapdoor and invites us into a mid-century American childhood teeming with snowclouds and striving siblings, restive phantoms, dark sulks and merry feasts. Ghosts of Fourth Street is well-honed and achingly generous—its central tragedy will stick in my chest a long time."
—Leif Enger, author of I Cheerfully Refuse and Peace Like a River
"Journalist Laurie Hertzel leads us through her Duluth girlhood amongst ghosts, until the deepest haunting happens when she's nine, and her brother Bobby dies shockingly. Her family of twelve fractures in silence, but Hertzel knows that memories don't just live in our shadows, they're present in our very DNA, making us who we are, even as they keep who we've lost alive. Monumentally moving."
--Caroline Leavitt, New York Times best-selling author of Days of Wonder and Pictures of You
"In Ghosts of Fourth Street, Laurie Hertzel somehow elegizes not only her own childhood in the 1960s but mine, too. Cars squeaking down snowy streets. Sugary sludge at the bottom of a bowl of Frosted Flakes. The ghost that must be living behind the furnace. How does she remember her childhood so vividly? How does she remember mine? Whatever is universal in twentieth-century American childhood, it's here."
--Melissa Fay Greene, author of Praying for Sheetrock and No Biking in the House Without a Helmet
"This wholesome, complex, and fascinating memoir documents the life of a middle daughter coping with the swirl of nine siblings (one doesn't make it), a dictatorial father, and an overwhelmed mother. Young Laurie Hertzel learns to stay bemused and alert; reading sustains her. By the final chapter, she's exultantly surfaced into the sunshine of 'those empty spaces we fill with stories.'"
--Mark Kramer, founding director, Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism, Harvard University