The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard

The Fates Will Find Their Way 

Author:  Hannah Pittard

Publisher:  Ecco

Publication Date:  February 1st 2011

From Goodreads:

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 boys in her thrall.  Far more eager to imagine Nora's fate than to scrutinize their own, the boys sleepwalk into a 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.

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The Fates Will Find Their Way reminds me a lot of The Virgin Suicides.  The story is told from the perspective of the neighborhood boys that circulated around Nora Lindell.  She disappears on Halloween when she is sixteen and takes on this grandiose persona.  We follow the boys through young teenagers to mid life as they fantasize and wonder what happen to Nora.

What I found so wonderful about The Fates Will Find Their Way is the writing.  The prose is beautiful and eerie.  It is a depressing read but it works.  It's as it was meant to be.  I thought Ms. Pittard did a flawless job writing a man's point of view.  I understood these group of guys and also understood their need to fantasize about where Nora could be.  It became part of who they were. In later years it bonded them, these married group of men still drinking together and speculating.  

If you do decide to read The Fates Will Find Their Way keep in mind this isn't a mystery so don't expect answers.  The story is not about Nora but about the boys that could never let her go.