This is another one of those pastiche novels that tells the story of overlapping groups of people in little vignettes. It has cool Rose-For-Emily thing happening with a first person plural narrator. It probably deserves a higher rating, but I think I'm just a little burned out on Hidden Lives of The Upper Middle Class novels. There's always a rape, always the brutal, accidental death of an animal, and always some dead/alcoholic parents. I probably should have saved this for when I was more in the mood for such a book.

Looks like somebody read The Virgin Suicides and thought "I could do that," and then did.

Such a beautiful read, and I felt like I could really imagine all the scenes in this book. Might not be for everyone because some of the more sexual scenes are a little

Horrible, ahorrense este libro mal estructurado. Es un tipo super difuso chismeando y dando brincos de rana en el tiempo mientras lo hace. Ese es el resumen. Desaparece una chava de su grado escolar y el resto de su vida se la pasa pensando en qué habrá pasado con ella, imaginándose escenarios suuuuper detallados de lo que le pasó (tan detallados que argumentaria que requiere ayuda psiquiátrica el tipo). Con una vida bastante irrelevante en general. Nada interesante pasa realmente en este libro nunca, no lo recomendaría ni siquiera por su longitud corta.

Way too similar to Virgin Suicides, I didn't find the musing of the neighborhood boys interesting and their characters weren't developed enough. It was enjoyable, but nothing too impressive.

At beginning of The Fates Will Have Their Way, we learn about the disappearance of Nora Lindell, a 16-year-old who was last seen on Halloween. No one knows what happened to her, but speculation runs wild among a group of neighborhood boys. They continue to piece together subtle clues and rumors over several years, even as they grow up, get married, and have their own children. Was she abducted and dead in the woods? Was she pregnant? Did she run away to a faraway city, like Phoenix? Maybe she even made it all the way to India. Who’s to say?

When I first heard the plot, I was inclined to compare it to Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, like so many others had done, too. Both books are told in plural first-person by a group of boys who were infatuated with a girl (or girls, in the case of Suicides) in their neighborhood. (Actually, I wouldn’t really say they were really in love with Nora, just that the event happened to be a huge moment in their own lives.) Both books also deal with some sort of tragedy involving those same girls. But the similarities largely end there. While Suicides is a look at the unraveling of a family told by outsiders, The Fates mostly examines the after-effects of Nora’s disappearance on the boys themselves. I don’t really thing it’s “spoilery” to say that we never do find out what became of her. That’s not really the point of the book. While their theories about her fate are interspersed within the story, most of it deals with the boys’ (and later, men’s) relationships with each other and their families.

Overall, I really liked the book. Hannah Pittard’s prose didn’t get in the way of the plot, and it actually moved very quickly. (I finished half the book in one day, and the rest in brief reading sessions during the rest of the week.) Her words are eloquent without being too flowery; poignant without being too preachy:

“We were growing up. It was one of those moments when you could practically feel the adult pushing out, pushing forward into the world. Perspective suddenly existed where it hadn’t existed before. This was just the beginning of our lives—our lives, things that we were responsible for, things that we could control. It seemed all at once too big and too simple an idea.”

“We thought about how little had happened in our lives, but how quickly the little that had happened had actually gone by.”

Aside from Tina Fey’s memoir, this is the first book released in 2011 that I’ve read. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it end up somewhere on my top 10 list at the end of the year.

This was a short, boring book. I read it in one day only because i was in NH with nothing much else to do. In the beginning, a 16 year old girl goes missing, and they never find her. The rest of the book is about the neighborhood boys and how they imagine her life turned out. They talk about it every year till they're at least in their 40s or older, because their lives are pretty boring apparently. We don't get closure on what exactly happened, and nothing really happens to these guys either, they just live their lives as a mirror of their boring parents, wasting away in the suburbs again. it's pretty depressing and boring and it's really a book about nothing. yet, because i was able to get through it, as i kept expecting something to happen, i'll give it 2 stars it was ok rather than one. you can probably skip this one, though.

The Fates is a story about a girl who goes missing and the many possibilities of what happened to her as speculated by a group of boys. Her classmates are obsessed with thinking about where she went and how her life ended up as they grow up themselves. It's a very quick and easy read. It reminded me of myla goldberg's "a false friend", which I enjoyed a lot. I didn't find it groundbreaking but a very good plane read.