This post will be updated with reviews as they come in.

PopMatters:

What’s most remarkable about Songs for the Missing is the fact that O’Nan’s great interest in cold, factual detail never prevents him from making the emotional lives of his characters the primary focus of his attention. [Read more]

The New York Times:

This is a fine, absorbing book. It’s easy to imagine that O’Nan is on a kind of mission to restore a simple, true sense of humanity to the novel: a worthy goal, indeed. [Read more]

USA Today:

Some books should come with warnings. That’s not a complaint, at least in the case of Stewart O’Nan’s haunting novel Songs for the Missing, which kept me up most of the night. [Read more]

The Boston Globe:

Connecticut author Stewart O’Nan is the literary equivalent of what baseball calls a spray hitter, the type of batter who can drive a ball onto the green between the chalk lines in any part of the park to get on base. [Read more]

The book’s emotional power is undeniable, as each character grieves for Kim, wanting her disappearance to mean something beyond “the world’s incoherence.” In the midst of that search, they elegiacally discover a little of what has been missing among themselves. [Read more]

The Free-Lance Star (Fredericksburg, VA):

O’Nan has an uncanny ability to show the still life in detail that we take for granted. The characters that O’Nan creates are so lifelike that one tends to forget that they are fictional. In “Songs for the Missing” it has an unnerving effect. [Read more]

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From The Page 69 Test:

It’s funny, the Page 69 Test, because page 69 of Songs for the Missing is both representative and an anomaly. [read more]

From Backstory:

The summer I was 17, I worked at a camp in Northeast Ohio, on the Lake Erie shore.  I was courting the girl who would later become (and still is) my wife, and many nights we would be up late, watching the slow progress of the oreboats and gazing at the stars over the water. [read more]