Rebecca McKanna: Don’t Forget the Girl
Join Indy Reads and Rebecca McKanna on June 22nd at 6:30pm for a reading and discussion of her new book: Don’t Forget the Girl. Signed copies of the book will be available to purchase at the talk.
Register with Eventbrite here.
Rebecca McKanna’s fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories 2019 and honored as a distinguished story in The Best American Short Stories 2019. Her work has appeared as one of Narrative Magazine’s Stories of the Week and has been published in Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Joyland, Third Coast, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among other publications. She has received financial support from the Sewanee Writers Conference and the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. An assistant professor of English at the University of Indianapolis, she earned her MFA from Purdue University. Rebecca was born and raised in Iowa.
Don’t Forget the Girl
We never remember the dead girls. We never forget their killers.
What is our responsibility when it comes to creating and consuming true crime content? DON’T FORGET THE GIRL by Rebecca McKanna (Trade Paperback Original, $16.99, June 20) is an addictive campus thriller that explores this question through sacred female friendships, queer romance, and a barely fictional depiction of our cultural obsession with serial killers.
Abby Hartmann’s presumed murderer, famous serial killer Jon Allan Blue, is sentenced to death row 12 years after the crime. Public obsession ignites, producing a sea of news stories, books, and a Netflix docuseries about the killer. But time doesn’t heal all wounds, and Abby’s former best friend, Bree, and former girlfriend, Chelsea, still struggle with the many ways they failed Abby and the secrets she may have been keeping. With less than a month until the execution, they’re running out of time to get their answers, so they turn to their last hope: famous true crime podcaster Rachel Morgan.
McKanna combines dual timelines with both third- and second-person perspectives in a poignant and unsettling story perfect for fans of Ashley Winstead and Megan Goldin. While DON’T FORGET THE GIRL is a hard-hitting novel that will haunt readers long after its thought-provoking conclusion, the hope within its pages will ultimately inspire them to lead more empathetic lives