Daniel Sweren-Becker

Summary: 16 YO girl goes missing in a small town. After a video of her grieving parents uploaded by her younger brother goes viral, a reality TV producer sees potential for a real-time series tracking the investigation. The true crime show becomes a huge sensation, but at great cost to all involved.

The narrative unfolds through interview snippets of the missing girl's family and friends, community members, police, online true crime fans, and the cast/crew of the reality show. Plusses for the portrayal of a community facing a crisis and how people react to TV cameras and the social media microscope. Interesting send up of Gofundme culture, reality TV, true crime, and who try to crack the case from behind their screens.

It is emotionally manipulative and once you see where it's headed, the amount of 'profit' motive driving many of the characters is a depressing thing to sit with and think about. Not an uplifting, feel-good kind of story and though not violent or explicit, I still found myself wanting to cleanse my reader palate of this one fairly quickly.

Still, very much worth the reading investment if you're interested in its themes.… (altro)

I've never read a book like this. It reads like a true crime story about a missing girl but is actually fiction. It shines a harsh light on the popularity of real crime TV and podcasts and the obsession that some people have with it. I found it to be a compelling read made up of interviews with all of the key players in the missing person drama - from the parents and brothers to the police and the TV producer and crew who made a 'real time' TV show out of the tragedy.

One day 16 year old Sara disappears. She leaves for school as usual but after she goes back to get her back pack from the bus, she's never seen again. When the school contacts her parents, they contact the police. the family and Sara's friends are overcome with grief and work with the police to help find her. A hot shot TV producer who is looking for something new hears about it and pitches the idea to follow the missing girl's story in real time for a TV show. Her story became national obsession due to the docu-series but did the series help or hurt finding out what really happened to Sara? This book and all of the interviews take place 10 years after the event when her friends and family are finally ready to talk about the missing girl.

Once I started this book, I couldn't put it down. It read like a true crime story even though it was really fiction. I enjoyed the way the story was told through interviews with all of the key participants in the tragedy. It was very different but I thought it worked very well. The book was about more than the tragedy of a missing girl. It was about America's obsession with true crime and about producers who often skew the truth of what's going on the make their true crime shows more interesting and controversial. The true tragedy was that the story of a missing girl became an obsession for the public and something for people to talk about it. It makes you question some of the true crime stories that are on our TV channels and the pod-casts that feature true crime.… (altro)