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]

San Francisco Chronicle: 50 Best Fiction, Poetry Books of 2008

O’Nan’s novel imagines the people left behind after a teenager’s disappearance. It’s about the ordinariness of unthinkable loss.

January Magazine: Best Books of 2008

With an almost forensic efficiency, O’Nan examines the effect of the mystery on the family, friends and the entire town. What happened to 18-year-old Kim Larsen is less important than how her parents and sister deal with the emotional aftershocks.

Hartford Courant: Best Reads of 2008

Stewart O’Nan, our own bard of Avon, gave us a searing account of what a family goes through when a child disappears. “Songs for the Missing” is a tense tale that pounds home the discomfiting truth that in order to get vital help and attention, such families must quickly learn to “market” their grief and anxiety.

Chicago Sun-Times: Favorite Books of 2008

Stewart O’Nan’s Songs for the Missing: Working in the realist tradition of Richard Yates, O’Nan depicts the heartbreaking ramifications of a loved one gone missing, expertly weaving his astute behavioral observations into taut and gripping prose. Edward Champion

L.A. Times: 2008 Crime Fiction Favorite

Stewart O’Nan’s “Song From the Missing” (Viking), meanwhile, is predicated on the disappearance of a teenage girl, but it steers clear of tabloid lures to delve into the small details; the story rings with quiet emotional truth.

Washington Post: Best Books of 2008

Songs for the Missing, by Stewart O’Nan (Viking). A pretty 18-year old girl drives to her job at a gas station, but never arrives. Her disappearance is at the heart of this novel, but its real concern is with her devastated family.

From The Toronto Star:

“If you look at the early stories of Yates and the early stories of Carver, the diction is very much the same,” says novelist Stewart O’Nan, who championed Yates’s writing in an influential 1999 Boston Review essay “The Lost World of Richard Yates: How the Great Writer of the Age of Anxiety Disappeared from Print.” [Read more]