A missing child has a profound impact on the family and the town she leaves behind — and in The Fates Will Find Their Way, author Hannah Pittard delves into the void that the disappearance of one 16-year-old girl leaves in the lives of the teenage boys who hardly knew her, while narrator Scott Shepherd gives voice to the boys’ past, present, and future.

Nora Lindell vanishes from her suburban neighborhood on Halloween, and the mystery of her disappearance is never solved. But for the rest of their lives, a group of teenage boys that ran in the same circles will wonder about her, creating their own personal visions of what her life might have become: Did she run away to the southwest, get married, have children? Was she abducted, tortured, murdered? Could she have flown to Mumbai and fallen in love with another woman? And — most chillingly — is one of the boys keeping something from the rest?

Despite all the unanswered questions, The Fates Will Find Their Way is not really a mystery: it’s a coming-of-age story told intriguingly from a first-person plural point of view — all “we”, “us”, and “our”. Shepherd gives a collective voice to a group of these most unreliable narrators — teenage boys — and imbues it with everything they’re feeling at that age: curiosity, excitement, bravado, confusion. But he also gives the text the sentimentality, nostalgia, and regret that the now-grown men feel while they’re looking back on that time, imagining Nora and filling in the gaps of their own faulty memories. The narration unspools at a leisurely pace, giving equal time to Nora’s possible fates and the boys’ attempt to reconcile who they were when she existed with who they have become. —Blythe Copeland