I live in Indiana, so I wanted to read this book for more information on the missing college girl, Lauren Spierer. It's hard to believe it's been so long she she went missing from the Indiana University campus. This book did open my eyes to new information that I never had. I spoke with friends about it and it seemed like each of us knew a fact or two, but none of us knew the whole story. I wish more information would come forward for her parents and sister. They deserve to know what happened that night and to know where Lauren is. I appreciate a book that laid out the facts and hope it brings new leads.

I found this book easy to read and follow along and thought it was written well. The fact that the author had an almost personal connection to the case made it even sadder to read, alongside the fact that Lauren Spierer was never found and we still don't know what happened to her. The book was well written and interesting, and laid out a few theories as to what might have happened to Lauren.

Thank you for the ARC of this book. This book was deeply sad, but I enjoyed the very direct/factual writing style that the author brought from his journalism work. I wasn’t familiar with this case, although Lauren was just a few years younger than me. The book lays out several theories, without being too grandiose, since unfortunately, we still don’t really know what happened to Lauren.

I thought it was well written, and I did think it was important and good for the author to address some of his personal controversies to clear it up.

This is a tragic, true crime book about a college girl that goes missing mysteriously one night with an unimaginable amount of things that could have gone wrong at any point in the night. Shawn, the investigative journalist, tries to get to the bottom of this tragedy over a decade later with the help of this girls family and friends but runs into so many road blocks and people unwilling to cooperate.

I think that this story and many others do need to be told and I give great credit to Shawn for staying with this for so many years. True crime isn't really my jam but I gave it a try. If nothing else, hopefully this book will help bring forward more truth so the missing girls friends and family will have closure one day.

I will never sit around and read something if it ever mentions Israel in a positive light

I hate that I have to leave a review for this otherwise it will affect my score on here but yeah, that’s all i’m going to say. I feel like I would’ve loved this book otherwise

After reading the first chapters, I was unsure if I would enjoy this book's writing style. Thankfully, the story settled in the longer I read. I found it an interesting true crime case, worth the read. I give this book a solid 3.5/5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to review College Girl, Missing by Shawn Cohen. All opinions are my own.

Based on a true story of Lauren Spierer. Shawn Cohen gives a lot of details about what happened the last night Lauren Spierer was alive. If you did hear about Lauren Spierer, she was a young 20 year old that ended up disappearing on June 3rd 2011 in Bloomington, Indiana. This case is still unsolved. Shawn Cohen wrote a page turner. Condolences to the Spierer family.

I have never heard of this story previous to reading the book. It didn’t give a ton of background so for people not familiar with the story, it made it hard to follow and keep track of all the names. Was more a memoir about the authors time working on the case than actually about the case. Would not recommend to people looking for a true crime book as it is more a memoir for the author

College Girl, Missing is a true crime book that focuses on the disappearance of Lauren Spierer, a young university student who went out for a night of fun in June 2011 and was never seen again, her body was never found, and no one ever had to answer for her disappearance.

I was looking forward to checking out College Girl, Missing: The True Story of How a Young Woman Disappeared in Plain Sight by Shawn Cohen when I received it due to being a true crime lover, but I am picky about the true crime I like. It has to be written tastefully, respectfully, and with at least some main focus on the victims. College Girl, Missing is a book that needed to be even more respectful because the people who love Lauren Spierer are still here and searching for big answers regarding what happened to her. In my opinion, it was respectfully written and displayed. While it could be argued that maybe author Shawn Cohen is biased in his views due to how close he has gotten to the family, I don’t think that’s true for a few reasons. This isn’t a book with a distinctive answer. Shawn gives the facts of what happened that night, and what the people involved have told him. No one has been convicted in Lauren’s disappearance and this book doesn’t exactly answer the question of what happened to her, but I don’t feel like that was the point. The point was to bring new life to Lauren's case, hoping that something could shake loose. It also challenged the reader to look at the evidence present and make their own conclusion on what they think happened.

Overall I gave College Girl Missing by Shawn Cohen an 8/10 rating. It got a higher rating from me because I appreciated that the book isn’t packed with what I call filler, which is just essentially irrelevant things to the main topic to make the book longer. The focus of this book is Lauren and what happened to her that night. Anything that is talked about is about her, the people who loved her, or the people who were around her that night. It doesn’t make for a super long read, but it made for a read that stuck to the facts and only that, which in a true crime novel I like. College Girl Missing while being incredibly sad and heartbreaking was also incredibly interesting and hard to put down. I won’t lie though it’s also a huge piss-off. Not the book itself but the people outside of Lauren, her parents, and her girlfriends are all insufferable and hard to read about.

Shawn Cohen breaks down everyone’s involvement in Lauren's night the night she went missing. While Lauren’s intoxication levels are a major focus of this book I really appreciate that it was never spun in a way to blame her. I got more of the feeling that it was there to explain how the things said by others involved could not have happened. I think sadly a woman being intoxicated often invites a lot of unneeded judgment on the victim when their physical state is only relevant when explaining if they could defend themselves or not. Is it right though that because a woman is in a state that she can’t defend herself she is murdered and never found again by her family? It’s just not right and I appreciated that Shawn often scrutinized any negative narrative that was put towards this, mostly because he learned his own lesson with that. When originally reporting on Lauren he focused too much on her intoxication levels and the fact that she was out with a man that wasn’t her boyfriend. He saw that all it did was taint the real person she was, which couldn’t be dumbed down in one evening's actions.

College Girl, Missing: The True Story of How a Young Woman Disappeared in Plain Sight by Shawn Cohen was a hard read, but also a really good one, and I think it’s important to be informed. If you enjoy well-written, victim-focused true crime novels I would really recommend checking this one out. I will say that before reading this book I had never heard about Lauren’s case before because I was 11 when it happened, so having now read it I can say that these types of things really do regenerate new life into old cases such as Laurens. In saying that though Lauren's case really isn’t that old, it happened 13 years ago. The people who love her are still alive and deserve to have answers as to what happened to her that night. Lauren deserves to come home to those who love her, and those who hurt her deserve to be punished.

An interesting read. The story is gripping, and the reader finds themselves disappointed by the number of potential people that could have come forward to help find her and did not. Overall, a good read.

Thank you to #NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

read if you like:
🕵🏻 true crime
👤 missing people
📖 non-fiction

summary:
This book is about Lauren Spierer, a sophomore at Indiana University, who went missing on her way home from a bar in 2011. I’m not usually a huge fan of non-fiction, but I remember this story well, being in my mid-20’s when it happened, and also having a friend of a friend who knew Lauren personally. It seems surreal that someone could disappear over a decade ago with really no progress in finding her, so I decided to check out the book, written by a journalist who reported on the original case for The Journal News.

The book does a great job with the details - giving the backstory on Lauren’s life, who she was and the circumstances around her disappearance. Even having followed the original story, I didn’t know much about her boyfriend and the book goes into detail on their relationship and why he was named a person of interest. Additionally, it talks a lot about the boys she was with that night, and the role they played (or didn’t play) in the investigation. The reporter doggedly pursues the truth from them, even a decade later, and does a great job of fairly recapping his discussions with them, which left more questions than answers. It made me glad the Spierers had someone like him in their corner who didn’t forget about their daughter.

This is a quick and thought provoking read, and again credit to the author for his relentless pursuit of justice and closure for Lauren’s family.

A true crime story that looks back into the disappearance of Lauren Spierer, who went missing from Indiana University almost 15 years ago.

To me, the saddest part about Lauren's case (besides the heartwrenching sorrow it must have caused her family and loved ones) is that 1) there are people known to the police who probably know what happened to Lauren but aren't talking and 2) these same people are not random strangers but people who purported to be her friends. Even close friends. Even her boyfriend. All people she should have been able to trust.

As a piece of true crime writing, College Girl Missing wasn't as quite compelling to me as others I've read. First off, it needed a concise timeline and maybe a map. Lauren's last night was super-confusing, involving a lot of people and places. (Perhaps these will be in a finished copy.)

Shawn Cohen, a newspaper reporter, starts the book off with a detached quality, removing himself from the omniscient narration of his text and using very little attribution and footnotes (again, I read an advance reader copy and perhaps that was added.)

The other interesting thing is that Cohen acknowledges, and incorporates into the story, a personal scandal he got caught up in when he was exposed for sleeping with a former source on a different story. He may have disclosed this because it's public record or because some members of the group of guys who should know what happened to Lauren used this information to taunt and discredit Cohen as he did research for the book.

I often feel sorry for people repeatedly dragged into the spotlight like this, but it's hard to feel sorry for anyone but Lauren, who was reckless and made some bad choices, as most of us did when we were young adults, and Lauren's heartbroken family, who still don't know where their daughter is.

Very unfortunate situation and horrifying true story.

Lauren disappeared in 2011 while attending Indiana University. She went to a college party one night and never made it home.
The facts and investigation information in the first part were all so interesting and had my attention.
Following the facts, I felt like we were listening to the same things over and over and sometimes just rambling on and the story didn't progress much.

Fell short for me, could be great for you.

Interesting story! I live not too far from IU where this happened and had never heard of this case. It was interesting and read about… comprehensive, insightful, and compelling!

College Girl, Missing, recounts IU student Lauren Spierer's disappearance after a night of partying in Bloomington.
Cohen's reporting digs deeper than the media from when the disappearance occurred, but lacks a crucial piece of an amazing true crime book, a smoking gun. The circumstantial evidence vaguely points to a group of young men, but leaves the reader wanting a more satisfying answer to the disappearance.

True crime readers will enjoy College, Girl, Missing and appreciate how digestible Cohnen's reporting is.

Thank you to NetGalley and Sourcebooks for the eARC!

I was enthralled by this case when it was first happening and I was hooked reading this as well. I felt like I was watching a dateline and felt that it was very well told. Overall I am not a nonfiction fan but I enjoyed this true crime book.

The author is a journalist who worked with the parents of missing college student Lauren Spierer.
I loved that the author did his own investigating by talking to other students on the campus. I had never heard of this case before and I do follow true crime. I hope this book reaches more people and ultimately Lauren is found.
There are some theories but someone has to know something.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC.

I thought this was really interesting. Read it in a day. Kept me engaged and wasn’t a dull moment. I appreciated the bits of the author’s story as well- it was like we were with them realtime as the information was being found. I like a peek behind the curtain at the process. This story is horrifying to think about. Lauren Spierer was a 20 year old college student at Indiana university who went missing one night in 2011 and was never found or heard from again. I can’t imagine what it’s been like for those involved. Especially her parents. What a horrible thing to endure.
This story is important to be told. Hopefully this book reaches farther than the headlines did and gets some answers or closure.

I really enjoyed this book. I remember following the investigation when it was happening, especially since I was going into college the following year. I enjoyed having the background of the first investigation and how Cohen tied into the whole investigation and the reasons behind you going back.

One thing that I didn't like as much is the endnotes on the kindle. It made it really hard to try to find the link in the back and be able to look at the source. This is more of a kindle issue as it does not allow you to bounce back and forth as easily as a book, but maybe footnotes would make it slightly easier for the reader to click on the links if they wanted to look at the notes more.

There were also a lot of names through the book that I started to get a few of the guys confused in my head. I think Cohen wrote this book in a way to minimize the confusion. There are so many characters within this book and some play very similar parts, but I didn't feel like I was confused throughout the book. There were just a few times that I had to think about which boy was who.

I enjoyed reading this book and read it basically in one sitting. This is a book that I would recommend to anyone that enjoys true crime books.

I live in Indiana and still remember when Lauren went missing and following progress on this investigation on the news. That was the main reason I decided to pick up this book. The first half was interesting as it reported on events of the night she went missing and the investigation.
I was a little more confused when reading the second part of this book. It focused more on the author’s life and speculations of what might have happen to Lauren. Honestly, this book didn’t really uncover anything new regarding this investigation. If you are not familiar with the story, the first half will give you good information but you would be fine skipping the second half.

Thank you NetGalley, Sourcebooks, and the author for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.