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.