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Virtual True Crime Book Group

What Happened to Paula by Katherine Dykstra

True crime book group meeting to discuss "What Happened to Paula: On the Death of an American Girl" by Katherine Dykstra.

Love watching true crime documentaries and tv shows? Can't get enough of true crime podcasts?

This is a monthly book group focused on reading and discussing True Crime.

Join us on Zoom to discuss What Happened to Paula: On the Death of an American Girl by Katherine Dykstra.

This title is available electronically from Libby/Overdrive for free with your library card. Libby copies will be available 4 weeks before the group's meeting date.

catalog record for physical book

"July 1970. Eighteen-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling left her house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Four months later, her remains were discovered just beyond the mouth of a culvert overlooking the Cedar River. Her homicide has never been solved.

Fifty years cold, Paula’s case had been mostly forgotten when journalist Katherine Dykstra began looking for answers. A woman was dead. Why had no one been held responsible? How could the powers that be, how could a community, have given up? Tracing Paula’s final days, Dykstra uncovers a girl whose exultant personality was at odds with the Midwest norms of the late 1960s. A girl who was caught between independence and youthful naivete, between a love that defied racially segregated Cedar Rapids and her complicated but enduring love for her mother, and between a possible pregnancy and the freedoms that had been promised by the women’s liberation movement but that still had little practical bearing on actual lives. The more Dykstra learned about the circumstances of Paula’s life, the more parallels she saw in the lives of the women who knew Paula and the women in Paula’s family, in the lives of the women in Dykstra’s own family, and even in her own life." -From the publisher

Questions? Email Katy at kjacob@cityofevanston.org.

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