Tuesday, January 25, 2011

2011 book 30

Hannah Pittard's The Fates Will Find Their Way
This book has been getting a lot of buzz, and with good reason--it's excellent. Comparisons to The Virgin Suicides are apt--though it's not as heartbreaking, the second person plural narrative voice coupled with the atmosphere of now-grown men looking back half-fondly, half-mystified-ly on their adolescence (and especially on the neighborhood girls of their adolescence) are definitely reminiscent of Eugenides. Here, the boys are obsessed by Nora, who went missing. They invent elaborate fantasies of what might have happened to her (it's not a spoiler to tell you that the truth is never revealed--this isn't a mystery/thriller and not-knowing is sort of the point), always thinking they see her in strange places. As far as I can tell, Pittard does a great job of delving into the mindset of the teenage boy--and the man the teenage boy becomes. Of course, I'm a girl, so who really knows. A.

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