Year in (Book) Review: The Fates Will Find Their Way

March 31st. End of Q1 (how corporate sounding is that?) After setting my obtainably aggressive goal of 30 books this year, averaging out to about 2.5 per month, I have read exactly one. One book. I’m a reader. I’m a writer. The odds are not in my favor here, but I just booked two flights for the next few months, and I’m not getting off either plane until I’ve put back at least a novel apiece.

Anyway.

Mixed feelings on this one. I chose it on a whim, based on the girl-logic of... I liked the colors on the cover. The Fates Will Find Their Way, Hannah Pittard’s first novel, tells the story of a teenage girl who disappears. At least, on the surface that’s what it does. Really, though, it gives us an inside perspective from an unidentified narrator – one of a circle of neighborhood boys who grow up with her – on the peripheral young lives that are affected by her disappearance. How they romanticize her, how they project their own curiosities and fears onto her mysterious life, how the ghost of her affects their friendships with one another, their relationships with their own families, how they view and interact and relate to the women they choose for wives.

It’s really a beautiful, somewhat haunting (couldn’t think of a less cliché word there, so I went with the obvious), quite matter-of-fact tone of voice. Wait. I take that back. To call it matter-of-fact would intonate that there are, obviously, facts involved. And there are none. When someone simply disappears, the people she disappears from are left to fill in blanks, gaps, and thread together a story from bits of scrap.

And that, I think, is why I finished the book feeling a little unsatisfied.

I don’t much care for ambiguity. I don’t like loose. I don’t know what it is in my personality that repels open-endedness, but I expect that, by the final page, or the closing credits, that I’ll feel some sense of completion. Fulfillment. Just ask my exes, many of whom still get semi-annual follow-up calls to discuss where we stand, what's going on in our (now defunct) relationship, and what I can expect for the future. It's awesome. I think they all really appreciate my thoroughness.

I got nothin’. I got a bunch of maybes and a couple might’ves and one or two who-the-hell-knows-what-happened-to-her-reallys.

So lovely narrative, original and interesting point-of-view, frustrating ending for those of us who are too childish to enjoy when things aren’t wrapped up for us in big bows.