The Fates Will Find Their Way

The Fates Will Find Their Way: A Novel by Hannah Pittard

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I won this book as part of The Saavy Reader Book Club and I am very grateful. While it is not my usual reading material, The Fates Will Find Their Way was an interesting experience.

Told by the boys who were left behind without closure, The Fates Will Find Their Way is the story of a young girl who mysteriously disappears. There seem to be few clues to her disappearance and its weight hangs over the community. The boys in her class gather the fleeting clues and weave them this way and that to create answers. Over the course of twenty years these boys, now men, ponder, and sometimes obsess over, what became of her. They hold the hope of her escape alive even as they marry and raise daughters of their own.

This storyline had the potential to be the kind of disturbing that keeps me up at night. However, it wasn't and it didn't. Somehow, as preposterous as it sounds, the boys' imaginings kept the underlying subject matter at bay. Maybe that it why they did it, to help themselves sleep at night.

I kept thinking to myself as I read this book, "but, it is written by a woman". In many ways, it is such a guy book, with male mentality and ridiculousness. For me, though, the parts of the story that really came alive were the images of what this girl's life might be. What might she be doing now? Answering that question and vividly protraying it as Pittard does, takes the eyes and wisdom of a woman.

The Fates Will Find Their Way is an interesting read that seems, at least for me, to battle the male and female voices and experiences.



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