I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still

watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,

soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,

Stories Without End from WB EZ Chicago.

Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.

Listen wherever you get your podcast.

From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is the Nerdat Book Club. It's just like a regular book club, except you don't have to share your snacks. This month's selection is Rebecca McKay's novel. I have some questions for you. It is a boarding school murder mystery. It's about Bodie, who is invited back to Granby, the boarding school that she attended to teach a class about podcasting.

When Bodie was a student, her former roommate Thalia, was murdered.

A Granby staffer, a black man, was convicted of the crime.

That is all I am going to say for now, though this is a spoilery conversation that abounds. So if you haven't read this book yet and you don't want to know what happens, go back in the feed and listen to my interview with the author Rebecca McKay. That is spoiler-free because we are going to get into it today. I am super excited to introduce you to this month's readers with us. We have Johnclan Hill. She is the host of the Vox

podcast, The Weeds, and the former host of the WAMU podcast Through the Cracks.

JQ, hello. Hello. It's so good to be here. Yay. Thank you for reading a whole ass book

and coming to talk about it. It is lengthy. It is lengthy. I know. I appreciate both of you

in your time with this one. We also have Jason Moon. He's a reporter and producer in New Hampshire Public Radio, and he hosts the podcast there called Bear Brook. Jason, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me.

Okay. So you are both hosts of podcasts. So I think we should maybe talk about like the podcast shaped elephant in this room, which is the timelines around how quickly these teenagers are making podcast episodes.

And especially you two have both made like audio documentaries about crime.

Do you have any sense of how long like an episode would take, let alone like a whole season of a show, like what they're talking about in this book?

Oh, gosh.

So we started reporting on through, I pitched through the cracks in 2016.

And the first season explored the story of Relisha Rudd, who was a second grader who disappeared from a family shelter in D.C.

and was missing for 18 days before the city realized anything was wrong.

And I didn't get to start reporting in earnest until 2018, and then it came out in 2021, just to kind of give a timeline.

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