I read this in a daze while my frantic, thunderstorm-phobic dog kept me up until 4am. So my impression might be a little foggy. Really well-written, but yeah, the extreme similarity to Virgin Suicides was pretty distracting.

I just finished the book this morning and I have lots of thoughts and feeling.

It reminded me of The Virgin Suicides. Not in a bad way though. It has the same first person plural voice and a group of boys who are obsessed with sisters. The story begins with the disappearance of Nora Lindell one Halloween and the neighborhood boys' attempts to reconstruct her final moments. This is similar to the the Greek chorus narrative that Eugenides uses, but the boys in this case are not trying to actively solve the mystery. They are more like gossips, dissecting every new piece of information that comes their way. The first person plural voice makes Pittard's narrators seem like a chimera of teenage boys and the men they become as they hash out their fantasies about Nora and her sister, Sissy, and speculate on course of their own lives.

I really loved how the story unfolded like the boys really were Fates determining Nora's destiny. Was she murdered two counties over the night she disappeared or did she run away and live an amazing life? It reminded me of Doctor Who in a way too. Like the boys were fixed in time, but Nora and Sissy weren't. As long as no one knew what became of the sisters, their lives were full of endless possibilities. This also allowed the men to reflect on their lives, so the focus kept shifting from past to present to future.

Pittard does a beautiful job of creating the incestuous aspects of suburban life in the way that everyone knows each others business and the kind of hive mind that develops from growing up and being friends with the same group of people your whole life. At the same time, she gives life to the individuals in the group, like my personal favorite, the kid who names all his dogs after himself.

I'll leave off with perhaps the most striking thing about the book: just how much life Pittard is able to wring from a sparse 240 pages.

Surprised to like this as much as I did (the book was given to me). Told from the perspective of a group of high school boys who throughout their adulthood still wonder about Nora who vanished during high school. As the boys imagine what has happened to Nora, they tell the story of their lives from awkward teens into adults.

This is a really fun read, and yeah, it almost is like you're reading Virgin Suicides fan fac, but there are equal parts Lovely Bones and even, in the more class influenced parts, bits of Secret History in here. It's like someone took all of the most successful middlebrow books of the last decade and whipped them up in a blender. Like all blender drinks, this one goes down smooth, maybe smoother than the originals. The question remains how valid a criterion smoothness is in terms of literary value, and that kind of haunts this book-- I did finish it and feel good about having read it, and now, well, nothing.

I honestly did find the classism of the book kind of strange-- we encounter a whole range of possible outcomes here, but those that are suffered by characters a little outside the upper middle class core of the book, like Trey and Hatchet, feel more serious than those felt by the others. I'm not sure what I think about that, except to say it felt deliberate, but in a way that was shorthand for something aside from some blind class prejudice on Pittard's part- like it's fate, not her who is to blame.

I can't remember what put this book on my TBR list, but since I'd really like to condense that list, I checked it out, thinking something would spark a reminder. Three days later, I'm left feeling somewhat unsatisfied. Why did I want to read this book? It's similar to The Virgin Suicides and I didn't particularly like that book. I feel this is one of those books where you either love it or don't. I'm just grateful it's a quick read. It made it easy to push myself to the end. I suppose it serves as a reminder see that you never know what people are thinking or what they'll do.

Read this book in 2 hours. Could not put it down!

While not an easy read, the voice is strong and takes you through the maturing of a group of male friends. You end up wiser and a bit sadder.

Wow.

The Fates Will Find Their Way is the story of a group of men that can't forget the girl that went missing when they were in high school. Their story is told collectively --use of we, our, etc-- and it gives their thoughts about what happened to Nora Lindell. It really says a lot about how we cope and if we can cope when there's no clear conclusion. Since no one knows what happened to Nora, they can only guess...and they have a lot of guesses, some happy, some sad, some outlandish. Very good read.