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3 reviews for:
Missing!: Mysterious Cases of People Gone Missing Through the Centuries
Brenda Z. Guiberson
3.09 AVERAGE
3 reviews for:
Missing!: Mysterious Cases of People Gone Missing Through the Centuries
Brenda Z. Guiberson
3.09 AVERAGE
I have a hard time reading nonfiction and this one was kind of "meh" as far as my interest goes. A teacher I work with had brought me a different book about disappearances to repair and told me that his students absolutely love it, so when I saw this one on sale from one of my favorite vendors, I jumped at it. Unfortunately, I think it will be a bit of a hard sell for many middle schoolers. Divided into six chapters, each about a different person's disappearance, Missing! gives a LOT of background information before actually getting to the details of each disappearance. (Each chapter is around 40-50 pages.) I found myself intrigued by the Amelia Earhart chapter, but I have always been interested in her life anyway. The chapter on Jimmy Hoffa...not so much. If I read aloud the first few pages of the chapter on D.B. Cooper and emphasize that they don't have to read the whole book cover to cover, I might convince one or two students to read it. But even they will probably get frustrated and confused by the chapter on the two princes in the tower. (Why do royals only use the same five names for children in any given time period?!?) Overall this had some interesting facts, but they were not presented with enough visuals or text features to be engaging for someone looking to browse only.
Very interesting compilation of cases, the line drawings are now always a great additions, wish she had picked more rare cases, the text was kind of plodding but overall interesting.
informative
medium-paced
Whodunit mysteries fascinate most of the world. There’s a reason why crime and procedural dramas populate TV, movies, podcasts, you name it. Yet, most of those end with a somewhat happily ever after, or at least a bow on the end and someone stands guilty of the crime. Brenda Guiberson does not look at cases that have a clear cut ending, instead she delves into the backgrounds and lives, sometimes even legends, of these people. The people she looks at are an array of people: from union leader Jimmy Hoffa to child author Barbara Follett to two princes from the Wars of the Roses era.
While the list of people and their stories are worthwhile to know about, the book as a whole was a let down. The title conveys that this will be looking into the cases of people who went missing, but instead, there is more background information about their life up until they went missing, which made this seem more like a biography book for middle school aged students than a missing persons book. There were times that only a page or two were devoted to the actual case of them going missing and the theories of what happened. The best part of the whole book are the pictures, diagrams, and cartoon drawings that were spread throughout. This is an okay introduction to background information of famous missing persons cases, but if anyone wants something deeper into their case or the theories surrounding it, then look elsewhere.