OH, the infectious nature of a "we" narration, the perils of a collective voice. Almost by its very nature this is a point of view infused with nostalgia, looking back to a time when "we" were not yet the individual "I" the adult world demands we become. Faulkner's "we" in the story "A Rose for Emily" conjures up a South long gone. And in Jeffrey Eugenides's novel "The Virgin Suicides," which circles around a tragic event - five sisters have killed themselves when the book opens - the communal reflection on childhood veils these harrowing deaths with a gauzy filter. Like "The Virgin Suicides," Hannah Pittard's first novel, "The Fates Will Find Their Way," centers on a tragedy that shadows an entire town. A 16-year-old girl named Nora Lindell has gone missing, an event that a collection of adolescent boys, the narrative "we," will be preoccupied with for more than two and a half decades, partly out of concern, partly out of curiosity and partly out of unresolved desire. Their preoccupation with the question of what has become of Nora will turn out to be more interesting than her disappearance itself. Distinct characters do emerge from the novel's chorus. There's Trey Stephens, the only "public schooler" in the group, who claims to have had sex with Nora the month before she disappeared and who is, we learn very early on, eventually incarcerated for having sex with a minor, his childhood friend Paul Epstein's daughter. There's Danny Hatchet, whose mother commits suicide. And Kevin Thorpe, who, in the mudroom at the Jeffreys' house, asks Sissy, Nora's younger sister, to "sit on it." These characters are joined by a host of others whose lives have already been determined for the reader by the time the storytelling begins. There are girls too. In addition to poor Sissy, taken in hand by a weeping Mrs. Jeffreys and delivered home after the incident in the mudroom with Kevin Thorpe, we meet Sarah Jeffreys, who "had been raped by Franco Bowles . . . when he was home from college one summer." And plain Minka Dinnerman, whose Russian mother is an exotic object of the narrators' desire, and who will die, as children shouldn't, before her parents do. One of the most impressive aspects of "The Fates Will Find Their Way" is how it summons up the elements of a suburban youth, with each image reinforcing the idea that danger has a different meaning for the young. The nameless, nearly timeless setting is home to this community of boys, who are linked by Nora's disappearance. But the novel also becomes the story of the town's girls and all the things men and boys can - or want to - do to them. What happened to Nora is never revealed, although many possibilities are offered, from a stint in Arizona with a man known only as "the Mexican" to the less plausible notion of a lesbian tryst in Mumbai. Rumor and conjecture offer scant evidence of all the lives she has possibly lived, including a life cut short, but her true fate is one of the many secrets the book keeps. What emerges from the narration instead of facts are exquisite details that translate instantly into memory: of a time when mothers used phone trees to pass along news, when kids hung out in basements with sliding glass doors, when a teenager "could practically feel the adult pushing out, pushing forward into the world." Memories of even the saddest parts of this childhood - drunken fathers, dying mothers, raped girls - acquire a gossamer quality. And yet the grace of Pittard's prose makes it difficult to feel the brute force of the book's central tragedy: we don't fully understand the boys' obsession with the disappearance of this girl for whom they once pined. As deeply felt as "The Fates Will Find Their Way" might be, it only circles around a plot, and so its collective voice eventually loses strength. The more characters are peeled away from the group, the less powerful the original collective becomes. We wind up knowing little more at the end than we did in those opening pages. BUT perhaps that's the point. Though on the surface this seems to be a novel about a girl's disappearance, at its core it's about how children become adults. "We cannot help but shudder at the things adults are capable of," Pittard writes, as the now-grown narrators watch their own daughters. That shift, from what teenagers can do to one another to what adults can do to children, is crucial. But what this novel is really examining is the moment when such a reckoning occurs. Nora Lindell's disappearance marks the end of youth. "The Fates Will Find Their Way" fixes on that point in time when the self-absorption and longing of children turn into the rather different but equally dangerous selfishness of adulthood. The young woman taken away, the sister left behind, the girl damaged by a boy she thought she knew - none of them have the opportunity to reflect on their past. We see them only through the filter of this group's imagining, and yet the assemblage of boys maintains its raw power. It is they who have the required distance to say: This is where and when we grew up. This is what we felt once, what we felt then. Hannah Pittard's tale centers on a girl's disappearance, a tragedy that will weigh on a group of suburban families. Jennifer Gilmore's latest novel, "Something Red," will be published in paperback this spring.

Pittard leads the reader into a slew of possibilities spinning out from a 16-year-old girl's disappearance, in her intriguing, beguiling debut. After Nora Lindell goes missing on Halloween, stories about her disappearance multiply: she got into a car with an unknown man, she was seen at the airport, she simply walked away, she was abducted. Pittard dips into the points-of-view of various classmates to explore these possibilities and more. Perhaps Nora was murdered. One theory sends her to Arizona, where she raises twin daughters with a lover named Mundo, and another path leads her to a near-death experience in a cafe bombing in India. The story also outlines effects of the disappearance on Nora's family and classmates, who, even as they graduate, marry, and have children, never quite let go of Nora-possibly to avoid their own lives. Though the truth about Nora remains tantalizingly elusive-the reader is never quite sure what happened-the many possibilities are so captivating, and Pittard's prose so eloquent, that there's a far richer experience to be had in the chain of maybes and what-ifs than in nailing down the truth. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Nora Lindell, a 16-year-old private schoolgirl in a suburban town, disappears one Halloween night. The boys in the town collectively narrate this haunted tale of Nora's imagined fate and their own lives, from their teens until they are adults with families. Nora lives on in their imagination-there are sightings and multiple theories about where she ended up, the boys fantasize about and date her younger sister, and they continue to think of her when they are with their own wives and children. Much of what they describe is mundane, yet Nora is always there in the background. The tension builds throughout the book, keeping the reader eager to find out what happened to Nora and to the boys and, later, to the men who were so profoundly affected by her disappearance. Verdict This debut from McSweeney's award winner Pittard is smart, eerie, and suspenseful and will appeal to fans of novels combining those elements.-Sarah Conrad Weisman, Corning Community Coll., NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Lauded short story author Pittard's carefully plotted first novel, centered on the aftermath of a 16-year-old girl's disappearance, is interestingly told from the first-person plural point of view of the boys she left behind. Now grown men with wives and families, they have, for the most part, remained in the sleepy, unnamed mid-Atlantic town of their youth. With the imagination of their awkward, sheepish teenage selves, the book's narrators, at once interchangeable and completely singular, imagine what has happened to Nora Lindell in the 30 or so years since she vanished. In endlessly revealing their elaborate conjectures, the boys-turned-men inadvertently tell their own story, which is, not surprisingly, the only place where Pittard draws any real conclusions in her quiet, satisfying tale. Of Nora we learn one thing for certain, that her disappearance continues to reverberate in the hearts and minds of those teenage boys she left behind, and that losing her and everything she represented placed a sad coda on every thought they've had since.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2010 Booklist