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Loading... The Fates Will Find Their Way: A Novelby Hannah Pittard
 admccrae | Apr 3, 2013 |  Read from February 26 to 27, 2011 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. (  ) melissarochelle | Apr 3, 2013 | Oh, this was fun. Very offbeat and full of surprises, yet at heart a true love story. Interesting threads -- alienation, growing up, leaving home/not leaving, boys vs. girls, adults vs. kids, moms vs. dads. Very well-crafted and not quite like anything I've read in a while. In a good way, if that's not obvious. I interviewed Hannah Pittard about this book at Greenlight Bookstore as part of the author-blogger pairing series in February 2011. You can read all about it here. (  ) lisapeet | Apr 1, 2013 | Language is a powerful tool. It can enrage the timid, soothe a lost crew at sea, and motivate the masses to march. If nothing else, language is a seducer. And from the pen of Hannah Pittard, it certainly does seduce. I love... (no, this is an instance where I choose to type like a freshman girl who picked Bobby Quarterback's pen up from the floor). I love, love, LOVE!!!! Pittard's language. Love it! OMG. Pittard uses words in a way I envy. She's insightful. Poetic. And yet it's all done so subtly. Really quite brilliant. Her craft is strong and I believe, one day, she'll be quite a force in the literary world. The Fates Will Find Their Way is a gorgeous read, but it is missing one vital component: story. No matter how beautiful the sentences come together, without story, it holds little weight. Shakespeare skillfully unveiled language, but what would Romeo and Juliet be without Capulets and Montagues? Without Romeo and Juliet? A year from now, if a friend asks me what The Fates Will Find Their Way is about, I'll probably say, "It's about a missing girl, and uhmm... the guys who... miss her, I guess." And then I'll rave about the language. It probably won't be enough to convince my friend. Pittard has gained my admiration. I look forward to reading more of her work. My sincerest hope is that her next offering is a bit heavier in story. Pittard's words Memorable Story = OMG!!!!!!! ( ) chrisblocker | Mar 30, 2013 | Terrific first book by Hannah Pittard. ( ) emcelroy | Feb 24, 2012 |
In this, Ms. Pittard’s debut is less novel than a chorus monologue: There’s no real plot, and the characters don’t develop (or only in superficial ways - the boys start families, buy homes, but their thoughts, attitudes and interactions remain adolescent). Instead, the book is a patchwork of discontinuous recollections, gossip and imaginings about Nora, the boys, their friends and neighbors. Where The Virgin Suicides had a good old gothic wallow in its adolescent turmoil, The Fates Will Find Their Way is more meditative. It leaps back and forth in time, looking forward to the boys' adulthood and back again, nostalgically, as they grow up. It's a coming-of-age story in which everyone is all ages, all the time. By turns, "Fates" is a mystery and a coming of age story, chock-full of sexual innuendo and misconduct that includes rape and possible murder. Although there is a lot of unseemly action in "Fates," there is very little dialogue. Pittard prefers to let her narrators ruminate, allowing her readers to form their own conclusions about what may have happened and why. As deeply felt as “The Fates Will Find Their Way” might be, it only circles around a plot, and so its collective voice eventually loses strength. The more characters are peeled away from the group, the less powerful the original collective becomes. At other times, the novel's voice seems weirdly incorporeal, lacking the visceral sense of what it's like to inhabit a breathing, sweating, working male body. These "we boys" who grow up to become "we men" are an oddly sensitive, feminine ideal of male consciousness, filled with quiet sorrow for the transgressions of men.
References to this work on external resources.
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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 the boys in her thrall. Far more eager to imagine Nora's fate than to scrutinize their own, the boys sleepwalk into an 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.
A masterful literary debut that shines a light into the dream-filled space between childhood and all that follows, The Fates Will Find Their Way is a story about the stories we tell ourselves–of who we once were and may someday become.
(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 19 Apr 2011 12:20:27 -0400)
Nora went missing on Halloween. Far more eager to imagine Nora's fate than to scrutinize their own, the neighborhood boys sleepwalk into an 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.… (more)
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I read many great reviews on this book; I wonder what they saw in it that I didn't. Needless to say, I did not like this book. It was a huge waste of time and I only finished it to find out what happened to Nora, which ****SPOILER ALERT**** never happens! You never find out what happened to her! The book is short enough that you can finish it in a few hours, but since I was so disinterested in it it took me two weeks. And there wasn't even a payoff in the end for finishing it! ARGH! The story jumps from past to present to past, from fiction to truth to fiction, in no particular order. The transitions are rough and disjointed and there is no closure in the end. You don't even find out much about the boys' lives other they are either married and have children or are single; the whole focus of the story is their theories of Nora's supposed life. Boring. One thing I am thankful for is that the book wasn't longer, so I didn't waste more of my time reading it.
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