Book Review: The Girls Are Gone by Michael Brodkorb and Allison Mann

The Girls Are Gone is a pretty insane true crime story, a family drama as opposed to a grizzly murder case. And that’s fine, not all true crime needs to be infused with murder, but I’m struggling to understand why this needed to be a full-length novel.

“This book is about a family destroyed by crimes that often go unnoticed.”

In the midst of their parent’s divorce, teenagers Samantha and Gianna Rucki go missing. And whilst their father is doing everything he can to find them, their mother is off sunning herself on extravagant holidays. And that’s only a smidgen of all the DRAMA!

The book is full of court transcripts and blog posts/news articles. It’s the equivalent of following a divorce and custody case, but unfortunately that involves having to read EVERY single statement and interrogation. I have no issue with reading court proceedings - Helter Skelter has quite a lot of them and I LOVE that book - but this was just dull. So much repetition, I just wanted to shout, “I GOT IT, OKAY?!”

My main issue though is the fact that we only get one side of the story. The book is co-written by a paralegal and a journalist who were involved in the case, and although the evidence presented indicates that this is seemingly how shit went down, the bias is just staggering. They don’t even refer to the possibility that they might not be impartial, it’s all just presented as “facts” and that bothered me.

So yeah. This is going on the donate pile. Glad I read it, because it was an interesting case with twists and turns, and it does really bring to light the awful consequences of parental abduction, but it didn’t really need to be a fully-fleshed novel, in my opinion. 2 stars.

Johann

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