Lost Girls - Robert Kolker

I watch a lot of Criminal Minds.  While I know it's all highly dramatized, moves much faster than any real investigation ever would, etc., it utterly fascinates me.  And so, when I needed a true crime book for my reading challenge, Lost Girls, about an unsolved serial killer case, was an obvious choice.

That said, while this is a true crime book, the crime is--again--unsolved.  That means that the perpetrator isn't know, so there's no way to really dive into the killer, his psychology, etc.  With that in mind, Kolker's focus is very much on the victims and their families and not the investigation itself.  While some information about the investigation is given, it seems like much is still kept under wraps, making reporting on it difficult and necessitating a "bulking out" of the book by talking to the families, relating Facebook drama of the victims' relatives, etc.  So, if you're looking for a true crime book heavy on the police procedural part, this probably is not the book for you.  But if the personal aspect of the victims draws you in, as well as the nasty little secrets and webs of small communities, you'll probably like this one.

So here's the focus: on Long Island, from 1996 to the time the book was written, five young women who worked as escorts and prostitutes vanished.  Following the very loud disappearance of the last one, an investigation was finally launched, and four bodies were discovered--but not the one of the girl whose screaming woke up a community and caused several 911 calls.  With the stage set, Kolker steps backwards, lining up the lives of the victims--Maureen, Melissa, Megan, Amber, and Shannan--including their often-troubled backgrounds, how they ended up as sex workers in New York, and in some cases how they ended up at Oak Beach, the small and insular community that may just be hiding a serial killer.  The cases are also potentially intertwined with a string of other unsolved cases attributed to a serial killer in Manorville, but there's no concrete proof of that and opinion on the matter seems to waffle.  So these five are the core.  Based on interviews with the people who knew these women before their disappearances and dealt with the questions and grief after, Kolker's work has a stronger tilt toward escorts on Craigslist than it does towards bodies in the sand, but until the case is solved, I'm not sure how it could be skewed in the other direction without delving into some very unresponsible reporting and conjecture.

As a study in psychology and spirals, I found this book fascinating.  I really enjoyed Kolker's writing and really felt for these women and their families.  I can't say this was an enjoyable read, because how can a read like this, without a solid resolution, ever really be enjoyable?  But it was riveting.  It's thrown out there that by some studies, the number one cause of death for prostitutes is murder.  Seriously.  Murder.  Not accidents.  Not suicide.  Not any form of disease.  If you're a sex worker, you're more likely to be killed, probably by a client, than you are to be hit by a car.  That is absolutely insane.  And as Kolker points out, a missing girl is only missing to the people who notice, and while these four women had people to notice, those people had a hard time getting authorities to believe them.  People don't care about missing and murdered prostitutes, something Kolker addresses along with the healthy dose of victim-blaming that was handed down by the police once they became involved.

This is not a fun story, and it is one that lacks a satisfying ending--but it is an important one, about how easy it is for people to be lost in the gaps of society, to be pushed aside and forgotten and blamed for their own murders.  Hopefully one day the truth will come out and the guilty party will be held responsible here--but that hope is, of necessity, a slim one, because as Kolker illustrates again and again, the women found at Gilgo Beach aren't exactly high-priority.

4 stars out of 5.

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud - Anne Helen Petersen

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud is either a book that you will find extremely vapid--it focuses on celebrities, because they are easy examples that Petersen can draw upon to illustrate her points--or that will enrage you because parts of it are just too true.  It's divided into ten chapters, each one focusing on something that women are declared "too" by modern society.  Most of these are listed right on the cover: too gross, too shrill, too fat, too slutty, too loud, too pregnant, too old, too strong, too queer, too old, too naked.  Is the word "too" starting to look weird to anyone else?  Each chapter exams one (or, in one case, two) women in the public eye who embodies the theme of that chapter, though Petersen notes in her introduction that every woman in the book really falls into more than one category, some of which aren't examined in depth; for example, Serena Williams is too strong, but she's also too loud and too black.

I'm not deeply familiar with a lot of the women that Petersen talks about here.  I'm not really dialed into pop culture very much, so while I know who Niki Minaj, Madonna, and Lena Dunham are, I don't know a lot about them, and there were others that I'd never even heard of.  But I do think Petersen did a good job of giving some background information on each and building out her case, including what seems like a lot of research for each chapter.  I was actually pretty impressed by that aspect; I listened to this as an audiobook, and I found myself thinking pretty frequently as she quoted old articles, pieces of interviews she conducted, and different bits of research, "Wow, a lot more work went into this than I thought."  Because Petersen writes for Buzzfeed, I guess I was expecting something a little more Buzzfeed-like--you know, very shallow and surface-level.  I was pleasantly surprised at how deep this actually went.  Petersen lays out all kinds of stuff that woman are penalized for by society for no good reason.  Like aging.  You know, that thing that all people do.  But while older men are allowed to be "Sexiest Man Alive," an older woman would never be given an equivalent title.  Women are only allowed to be pregnant in public if they revel in their pregnancy and play out their roles without mentioning any of the absolutely awful stuff that comes with pregnancy.  If they assert themselves about how they are treated or their opinions, they are too loud or too shrill, things that are used to tear women down when there's no logical argument against them.  The double standards that women face in society are numerous and immense, and it is infuriating.

Petersen makes good points here, but ultimately it was nothing that was new to me.  There were a few nod-worthy moments of, "Oh, I hadn't thought of it exactly in that light," but I think Petersen is preaching to the choir here.  The people who are going to read this book are the people who don't need to be told these things; we already know about them, acknowledge them as the problem they are, address them with others, and try to correct them.  Society at large is not going to read this book.  Society at large does not care.  That is how we got to where we are today, and why it is such a long, slow slog to make any progress at all in fixing things.  Additionally, because these women typically fit into more than one category that Petersen has to touch on, almost every chapter felt like it was rehashing another one to some degree.  I would have also liked to see a few more women who weren't pop culture icons--two members of the Kardashian family (Kim and Caitlyn Jenner), stars of women-oriented shows, etc.  I understand Petersen's point that celebrities are easy to distill down into the categories she wanted to use, but would have liked to see some sort of point of how these things affect all women, not just ones whose very existence revolves around their presence in the public eye.


Overall, a good one, and an important one, but one that feels somewhat like it was shouting into the void and missing a large point of the population both in focus and audience.

3 stars out of 5.