After Etan: The Missing Child Case that Held America Captive by Lisa R. Cohen

I just finished this true story on the disappearance of 6 year old Etan Patz in 1979. Etan walked to the bus stop for the first time alone and disappeared somewhere within an 8 minute range of time. The family still lives in their SoHo apartment and has the same phone number with the idea that maybe he could one day come home or call. Although he was pronounced officially deceased in 2001, I can certainly understand hope holding them out.

Aside from how gripping a story it is - never fully solved, continuous updates every few years, the beautiful little boy - this book was really amazing. The author is a media producer who had followed the story over the course of her career and made it less about how traumatizing of an event this is but more about the people and relationships that it affected. We all know about Adam Walsh from the work his father has done but it actually was Etan's mother, Julie, who really started to galvanize the missing children's movement - having schools let parents know when their children don't come in, making it a federal crime, etc.

I think the most traumatic part of this book/story was the idea that there has never been a body or a concrete end to the search. Investigators certainly feel they have the correct man and were able to put him away until 2014 for an unrelated crime but I feel for the parents and can't imagine the anguish of never just KNOWING of always asking "what if?" its terrifying.

Certainly as a child/teenager/young adult I chafed under my parents restrictions - thinking they were being too clingy or cautious or overbearing. But reading this book and how often they say "Everything changed after Etan" I can kind of see where it came from (it might also be the adult perspective coming out). Its easy to say "let them grow and make their own way" but jeez, when an 8 minute period can wreck havoc on your entire life and sanity - is it worth it?? Julie (the mom) apparently coped well after a time and was able to raise her other 2 children without the smothering I would have expected but the book set me on edge and made me rethink the limits I had as a kid and realize that no precaution is too much when your child's life is at stake. Ugh, does this mean I have to say my parents were right?

This isn't a book I would typically read, terrible things happening to children completely unravel me but as I mentioned above, though there are some very hard parts to it, I feel overall its a book of the good that can come out of the awful from sheer will, luck, blood, sweat and tears.

I don't think the Patz family will ever know true peace but hopefully they can take some comfort in the millions of other child lives they have saved over the past 30 years.