What Happened to Paula : On the Death of an American Girl
by Dykstra, Katherine







Prefacexi
Chapter 1 The Crime
1(14)
Chapter 2 An Inheritance
15(14)
Chapter 3 The Girl
29(18)
Chapter 4 Her Birthright
47(16)
Chapter 5 Her Coming of Age
63(16)
Chapter 6 The Black Boyfriend
79(17)
Chapter 7 The Detective
96(20)
Chapter 8 The City
116(9)
Chapter 9 The White Boyfriend
125(17)
Chapter 10 The Timeline
142(12)
Chapter 11 The Flood
154(15)
Chapter 12 The Double Bind
169(16)
Chapter 13 Her Options
185(20)
Chapter 14 The Phone Call
205(20)
Chapter 15 The True Crime
225(19)
Chapter 16 The Paulas
244(11)
Afterword255(12)
Acknowledgments267(4)
Notes271(16)
Selected Beadings287


"A riveting investigation into a cold case asks how much control women have over their bodies and the direction of their lives. In July 1970, eighteen-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling left her house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and never returned. A cold case forfifty years, Paula's story had been largely forgotten when Katherine Dykstra began looking for answers. A woman was dead. Why had no one been held responsible? How could a community give up and move on? Could there ever be justice for Paula? Tracing the knowns and unknowns, Dykstra discovers a girl who was hemmed in by the culture of the late 1960s, when women's rights had been brought to the fore but had little practical bearing on actual lives. The more she learns about Paula, the more parallels Dykstra finds in the lives of the women who knew Paula, the lives of the women in her own family, and even in her own life. Captivating and expertly crafted, What Happened to Paula is a timely, powerful look at gender, autonomy, and the cost of being a woman"-





Writer and editor Dykstra took over the project of writing about Paula Oberbroeckling, a white 19-year-old murdered in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1970, from her mother-in-law, a fiction writer who grew up in Cedar Rapids as Paula's contemporary. Combining memoir with true crime, à la I'll Be Gone in the Dark, and with social history, like in Becky Cooper's We Keep the Dead Close, Dykstra follows many leads, but, rather than solve the 50-year-old cold case, she seeks to examine the bigger mystery of how society could have allowed her to die. While Paula's disappearance and death received little media attention, and the police investigation revealed unhurriedness and inconsistency, local theories proliferated, mostly regarding two men Paula dated before she died, one Black, one white, and a rumored pregnancy and ensuing, deadly illegal abortion. Delving into studies of beauty, violence toward women, racism, and women's sovereignty over their own bodies in the last half-century, Dykstra recounts scares and opportunities she and the women in her family experienced. Hand to fans of this popular genre blend. Copyright 2021 Booklist Reviews.






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