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

Author: Katherine Dykstra

Narrator: Nan McNamara

Unabridged: 9 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/15/2021

Synopsis

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 for fifty 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.

*Includes a downloadable PDF of Notes and the selected Readings from the book

About The Author

Katherine Dykstra is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her essays have been published in the Washington Post, Poets and Writers, and Real Simple, among other periodicals. She lives with her husband and two children in New Jersey.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Keisha on March 18, 2021

This book really disappointed me. I was so enthralled by the synopsis and completely let down by the book. There was to much unnecessary filler and not enough about the actual case itself. I wanted an in-depth look at the story, the investigation and I was instead met with painstakingly boring fille......more

Goodreads review by Mystic on July 11, 2021

This was a strange book. I am a true crime enthusiast and was looking forward to reading about another cold case of a forgotten girl. However, I became irritated and uninterested when the author started talking about herself and her experiences growing up as a woman and young mother. She often went......more

Goodreads review by Angie on July 10, 2021

I got sucked into this book on July 9th 2021 and finished on July 10th, 51 years after Paula had gone missing. This story is not a true crime drama, but rather a reflection on the treatment of women in our American society, specifically young women prior to Roe. As someone who grew up in Cedar Rapid......more

Goodreads review by Julia on March 06, 2021

This impressive, important book is both a deeply reported true crime investigation and a feminist cri de couer. It also reads like a thriller. Katherine Dykstra is a wildly talented writer. I loved it.......more

Goodreads review by Stephanie on July 14, 2021

Such a great book. A fascinating look at Paula Oberbroeckling's life and exploration of her unsolved wrongful death. Thoughtful and reflective about the worth of women, our place in the world, what we learn from each other. Not a typical true crime story--and actually advances the genre as a very ti......more

Quotes

Dykstra casts a searing light on racism, sexism, and the stigma of being a ‘bad’ girl. This is the perfect blueprint for any true crime writer moved to investigate a cold case.—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Paula’s story is riveting—not only for her time, but for our own. This book is fascinating, heartbreaking, and empowering all at once.—Abby Sher, coauthor of Sanctuary

A sharp and seductive investigation into the unsolved death of a young woman fifty years ago becomes, in Dykstra’s telling, an investigation into the genre of dead-girl true crime itself. A bracing and powerful book, unsentimental and sleek, and a roadmap for actual change.—Lacy Crawford, author of Notes on a Silencing

A vivid, unflinching account, with its share of rage and sensitivity, equal in power and tenderness, What Happened to Paula is the story of the daring task of living in a female body. This deeply moving investigation is required reading for anyone who is or knows a woman. —Mira Ptacin, author of Poor Your Soul and The In-Betweens

A book like no other. A murder mystery. A powerful exploration of what it means to be a vibrant woman in this cold, unfeeling, and somehow, still wonderful world. Debut author Katherine Dykstra will blow your mind.—Marcy Dermansky, author of Very Nice

The most chilling thing about What Happened to Paula is that although Paula died fifty years ago, her story could be that of a teenage girl in 1990 or 2000 or today. This is essential reading, as gripping as any thriller. —Julia Dahl, author of Invisible City and The Missing Hours

The missing-girl narrative can create a sort of pleasing cleanliness around the idea of violence against women: a heinous act, an innocent girl, all to be properly vilified and mourned. What Happened to Paula upends and unpacks all the smaller, subtler, scarier violences that live inside of this: what of all the ways the girl wasn’t innocent, what of all the ways none of us are? —Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want

A missing person, an unsolved mystery — but this is no typical true crime book. Instead, Dykstra looks at the context, the life Paula lived, in all its small moments of violence and violation, before she was murdered. Thoughtful and thought-provoking.—Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe

A provocative true-crime page-turner on how sexism, racism and public opinion set up women for violence.—People

What Happened to Paula resists the true crime genre...The book doesn’t rely on [Paula’s] homicide to be the climax. It resists playing into the very problem it is critiquing. The book is an unspooling of all the people and systems that conspired in Paula’s death. It has not one cause, but too many. —Tana Wojczuk, BOMB

What Happened to Paula is not only the story exploring theories about the crime that ended Paula's life; it also reflects on other true crime stories with women as their victims, including rape and rape-murder stories, and on the burdensome costs of being born in a female body. What Happened to Paula is sobering, insightful, and a highly recommended addition to both true crime and women's issues collections. —Midwest Book Review

Rather than simply trying to piece together a perpetrator from the facts of the case, Katherine Dykstra takes a different, more thoughtful, approach to Paula’s story, examining how stifling community standards, antagonism against interracial relationships, and assumptions about “bad girls” worked in tandem to condemn Paula and bury her story.—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads

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