I need to preface this review with a couple of notes — namely, that I’m not usually one to leave reviews, and that I do not fall into the sunk-cost fallacy of reading. If there’s a book I don’t like 20 pages in, I’m not going to waste time finishing it (a sentiment a lot of my friends do not agree with, oddly enough).

That said: I had to finish this book, despite my dislike of it. I was drawn in by the comparisons to Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, which (somewhat unfortunately) remains one of my most favourite books. A handful of pages in, I was disappointed by how pale of an imitation of TVS this was but I also wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt - essentially, I wanted to try to read it without the comparison in my head, which was clouding my judgement.

In the end, I finished reading it because I wanted more of a reason to dislike it beyond well, it’s not Eugenides, is it?

That, it is not. Perhaps I should have known it wouldn't be when Pittard chose Virgil for the epigraph, rather than Aiskhylos.

Rather than being a novel that highlights the «dream-filled space between childhood and all that follows», this is about a group of suburban boys that do not ever truly become men; who view girls & women through the prism of what is done to them and the roles they play in the boys’ lives; and who condone SA in a very polite, vaguely horrified way but who ultimately do nothing about it.

That there is barely a sense of time and place is yet another fault for the book, as is the explicit mention of nationality (which is also framed as a stand-in for race & ethnicity) for only one character - in such a way that it is important to their ‘character development’, as it were - and a distinct lack of that mention for literally everyone else. The implication of such is that a majority of the characters are the American ‘standard’, aka WASPs.

Ultimately, it felt like the boys’ obsession over the disappearance of Nora Lindell was significantly less about her actual disappearance and more about their strange possessiveness over her narrative, to the point where they don’t truly want to know what happened to her or how her disappearance affected her family. After all, that would mean they would have to consider her personhood in its entirety.

Because I do not want to be negative all the way through, I will share the one passage that I found particularly striking:

«She wanted to be a baby again, to be anything other than a girl. She wanted for sex not to exist. She wanted for Trey Stephens not to exist. She wanted for the aqua-blue aquarium and that basement and those boys to never have existed in the first place. She regretted her uniform. She regretted her legs and the urge ever to have shown off her knees. She regretted skin. Yes, skin. That was it. More than anything she regretted the existence of skin-hers or anyone else's.»