Review: The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard
From Goodreads: 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.
The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard is one of the more beautiful books I have read in my lifetime. I felt like I was watching the passing of time and living my life secretly along with the boys who miss Nora. At first as the reader I wanted to know what did happen to Nora, but the feeling passes and you are waiting with bated breath for the next story the boys concoct of her disappearance and later the stories they tell about themselves.
Pittard hits the nail on the head of life in suburbia. The boys and girls and eventually men and women do what their parents did before them. They seem mildly apathetic, due to the loss of Nora and the what if’s plaguing their lives. I think I was most sensitive to Danny whose mother killed herself because she had cancer, and whose father was a raging alcoholic. The boys while kind to him never truly respected him or saw him as a peer growing up. Trey I wondered a lot about in the beginning of the book, the road he took for himself seemed genuine.
I just can’t say enough about this book. It is a unique opportunity into the minds of others. There is laughter, tears, and heartbreak and you will be engrossed on every page turn.
FTC Disclosure: I received this title from the lovely Mark at Harper Collins for the purpose of review.
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Review: Beautiful Dead (Book 1 Jonas) by Eden Maguire
Something strange is happening in Ellerton High. Phoenix is the fourth teenager to die within a year. His street fight stabbing follows the deaths of Jonas, Summer and Arizona in equally strange and sudden circumstances.
Rumours of ghosts and strange happenings rip through the small community as it comes to terms with shock and loss. Darina,Phoenix’s grief-stricken girlfriend, is on the verge. She can’t escape her intense heartache, or the impossible apparitions of those that are meant to be dead. And all the while the sound of beating wings echo inside her head! And then one day Phoenix appears to Darina.
Ecstatic to be reunited, he tells her about the Beautiful Dead. Souls in limbo, they have been chosen to return to the world to set right a wrong linked to their deaths and bring about justice. Beautiful, superhuman and powerful, they are marked by a ‘death mark’ – a small tattoo of angel’s wings. Phoenix tells her that the sound of invisible wings beating are the millions of souls in limbo, desperate to return to earth.Darina’s mission is clear: she must help Jonas, Summer, Arizona, and impossibly, her beloved Phoenix, right the wrong linked to their deaths to set them free from limbo so that they can finally rest in peace. Will love conquer death? And if it does, can Darina set it free?
Beautiful Dead has every element that I dislike seeing in a paranormal work. The book is about zombies but maybe I am missing the point. It seems like a lot of authors are taking from supernatural elements and renaming them into something they are not.
The teens die in a mysterious way and are reanimated by an overlord who gives them a year to the date of their death to solve the mystery of their murder. To me this feels more like necromancy especially with the supernatural elements that the author gives the said zombies. Time travel and magic over time. Each teen has a ‘death mark’ that is tattooed onto the spot of skin where they are killed.
I think I would have liked the book more if the author had left out the word zombie and had only called the characters the “Beautiful Dead”. I was not able to connect with the characters in any way and some of the character names seemed to pull me out of the story a bit. Such as having a boy named Phoenix and a girl named Arizona, I could only think of Phoenix, Arizona while I was reading.
Darina who is the main character you follow through the world is still alive. She helps the Beautiful Dead to find out from the living information that may be used to solve their murder before they pass on for good. I felt she was a very bad example for teens. She only cared for the boy who died, even more than caring for herself. I also disliked that yet again in a young adult novel the parents are lame, and hard, and on the point of being abusive. Not every kid has crap parents.
In the end I do not think I will be reading book two. I struggled over this review trying to find some silver lining to share with you but I am unable to do so. I suggest from the same publisher reading either Dreaming Anastasia by Joy Preble or Bran Hambric by Kaleb Nation. Both of these works are good examples of what Source is trying to convey with their Teen imprint.
