The Fates Will Find Their Way: Summary and book reviews of The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard, plus links to an excerpt from The Fates Will Find Their Way and a biography of Hannah Pittard.
The Fates Will Find Their Way A Novel
by Hannah Pittard
Hardcover: Feb 2011,
256 pages.
Paperback: Jan 2011,
256 pages.
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.
Pittard so successfully and effortlessly blends these boys' voices into those of grown men that even though we never truly know for certain what happens to Nora, by the last page we do feel that the mystery, the fantasies about Nora Lindell have come full circle. (Reviewed by Donna Chavez).
Kirkus Reviews
Gracefully written by the winner of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, this elegiac portrait of an upscale community offers an interesting take on modern manhood.
Library Journal
This debut from McSweeney’s award winner Pittard is smart, eerie, and suspenseful and will appeal to fans of novels combining those elements.
The New York Times - Jennifer Gilmore
Though on the surface this seems to be a novel about a girl's disappearance, at its core it's about how children become adults. ...That shift, from what teenagers can do to one another to what adults can do to children, is crucial. But what this novel is really examining is the moment when such a reckoning occurs.
Booklist
In endlessly revealing their elaborate conjectures, the boys-turned-men inadvertently tell their own story, which is, not surprisingly, the only place where Pittard draws any real conclusions in her quiet, satisfying tale.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A debut novel sure to linger with readers ... Pittard leads the reader into a slew of possibilities spinning out from a 16-year-old girl's disappearance, in her intriguing, beguiling debut.
Patrick Somerville, author of The Cradle
... [S]imply tremendous—a beautiful ... relentless exploration of a crime. It would be almost too sad to bear the implications of this story if it weren’t for the warmth, hope, and kindness of its haunting prose.
Nobody knows why Nora Lindell, the main character of Pittard's novel, went missing 30 years ago, but one theory is that she ran away.
Below is some information on modern-day runaways:
Runaways vs throwaways
A runaway episode is either when a child leaves home without permission and stays away overnight; or a child who is away from home chooses not to come home when expected and stays away one night if 14 years or younger, or two nights if 15 years or older. A thrownaway child is one who has been told to leave the home, or is prevented from returning home, by a household adult for a night and no adequate care is provided.
How big is the problem?
According to the National Runaway Switchboard, between 1.6 and 2.8 million youth run away every year in the United States (representing about 4-7 percent of the US population aged between 7-17 years old). Although the Department of Justice 2002 report puts the number of runaways/throwaways at the low end of this scale - about 1.7 million per year - it is still an...
"Robinson's prose is beautiful, shimmering and precise; the revelations are subtle but never muted when they come, and the careful telling carries the breath of suspense....Robinson truly succeeds in what is destined to become her second classic."
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(1157 words).
Publishers Weekly
Patrick Somerville, author of The Cradle
