Book Review: The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard

Title: The Fates Will Find Their Way
Author: Hannah Pittard
Publisher: Ecco
Publication Date: January 25, 2011
Hardcover: 256 pages
ISBN: 978-0061996054
Genre: Literary Fiction

From the Publisher:

Sixteen-year-old Nora Lindell is missing. And the neighborhood boys she’s left behind are caught forever in the heady current of her absence.

As the days and years pile up, the mystery of her disappearance grows kaleidoscopically. A collection of rumors, divergent suspicions, and tantalizing what-ifs, Nora Lindell’s story is a shadowy projection of teenage lust, friendship, reverence, and regret, captured magically in the disembodied plural voice of the boys who still long for her.

Told in haunting, percussive prose, Hannah Pittard’s beautifully crafted novel tracks the emotional progress of the sister Nora left behind, the other families in their leafy suburban enclave, and the individual fates of the boys in her thrall. Far more eager to imagine Nora’s fate than to scrutinize their own, the boys sleepwalk into an adulthood of jobs, marriages, families, homes, and daughters of their own, all the while pining for a girl–and a life–that no longer exists, except in the imagination.

A masterful literary debut that shines a light into the dream-filled space between childhood and all that follows, The Fates Will Find Their Way is a story about the stories we tell ourselves–of who we once were and may someday become.

My Review:

The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard is a beautiful, moving and at times heart-breaking story about the disappearance of Nora Lindell and how the small band of male friends deal with this loss in their lives, about their interactions with one another and how their lives change as they mature and marry. Sixteen-year-old Nora Lindell disappears on Halloween and while everyone has ideas of what has happened, no one truly knows. The book is written in first person plural, told from the perspective of adolescent males primarily made up of Jack, Paul, Danny, Chuck, Stu, Marty, Trey, Drew, and Winston, all who attended the same private school, except for Trey, the only one in their clique to attend a public school. The reader will learn about Sissy Lindell, Nora’s younger sister, Minka Dinnerman, and Sarah Jeffries, but never their exact views on Nora’s disappearance as the entire tale is told through the eyes of the guys. Pittard has the story unfold in a beautiful, seamless and non-linear manner, which helps to keep the reader’s interest in the lives of so many characters. Through the use of vivid imagery and prose the reader is able to follow the boys’ paths from childhood to adulthood and their continuing speculation to what could have become of Nora. I have not come across a work of literature quite like The Fates Will Find Their Way and found it to be delightfully refreshing, astonishingly brilliant, deeply profound and a beautiful story of how one event could (or could not) bring about, changes in each of the male characters. I would not hesitate to recommend The Fates Will Find Their Way to readers and discussion groups alike.

About the Author:

Hannah Pittard’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Oxford American, The Mississippi Review, BOMB, Nimrod, and StoryQuarterly, and was included in 2008 Best American Short Stories’ 100 Distinguished Stories. She is the recipient of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a graduate of the University of Virginia’s MFA program, and the author of the novel The Fates Will Find Their Way. She divides her time between Charlottesville and Chicago, where she currently teaches fiction at DePaul University.

I received a complimentary ARC of The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard from Ecco to review. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned novel.

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