Sadieby Courtney Summers
Published by Wednesday Books
Publication Date: September 4th, 2018
Genres: Young Adult, Contemporary, Mystery, Suspense
Format: eARC
Source: Kindly provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review
Summary from Goodreads:
Sadie hasn't had an easy life. Growing up on her own, she's been raising her sister Mattie in an isolated small town, trying her best to provide a normal life and keep their heads above water.
But when Mattie is found dead, Sadie's entire world crumbles. After a somewhat botched police investigation, Sadie is determined to bring her sister's killer to justice and hits the road following a few meagre clues to find him.
When West McCray—a radio personality working on a segment about small, forgotten towns in America—overhears Sadie's story at a local gas station, he becomes obsessed with finding the missing girl. He starts his own podcast as he tracks Sadie's journey, trying to figure out what happened, hoping to find her before it's too late.
Review
Sadie is a unique story focusing on a young woman who, once finding out that her sister has not only been taken from her but murdered, has her mind set on revenge. Out for blood, Sadie will stop at nothing to get her hands on Mattie's murderer.
This is the first Courney Summers' book I've read and I have to say that Summers knows what she is doing. By taking surprisingly bold risks, she tackles heavy issues in a way that leaves you not only thinking about the story or it's contents but also the words she has written. Honestly, it was a bit overwhelming to be reading such a emotional, hard-hitting, story. It makes you feel so many emotions and demands your utmost attention. It will move you in a way that not many authors are able to accomplish.
Sadie was well-written, emotional, dark, gripping, disturbing. It was a tough book to go through but one that, I can not stress enough, has to be read. The pace was rather slow in the beginning but ended up building momentum as the story progressed. I enjoyed the whole podcast format, which has become increasingly popular with authors and readers alike. Alternating between the podcast episodes and Sadie's voice worked well in this context, it helped build up the tension and create an atmosphere that leaves readers sitting on the edge of there seat. Macmillan has released a podcast that follows the novel every Wednesday, if you want to check that out I will be leaving the link to the podcast above.
Sadie was beyond-a-doubt my favourite character to read. Though she may have a dark past and intrusively dark thoughts, she is able to show how good of character she truly is. Having gone through what she has, Sadie grows up faster than she should. I felt the most for her and Mattie throughout the story and couldn't help but wish their story could have gone differently. By ending the story the way she did, Summers made Sadie's story feel that much more real.
This was truly an amazingly moving, and disturbing, book to read about the strong bonds of sisterhood, the responsibilities that are placed on children way too young, facing loss, revenge, and hope. Overall, Sadie is a book that simply must be read. Seriously, pick it up. With that being said, sensitive readers should take into account the trigger warnings mentioned below and know their limitations.
TRIGGER WARNING: This story does contain child abuse, pedophilia, sexual assault, drug and alcohol abuse, and graphic violence.
Rating
★★★★★
About the AuthorCourtney Summers lives and writes in Canada. She is the author of What Goes Around, This is Not a Test, Fall for Anything, Some Girls Are, Cracked Up to Be, Please Remain Calm, and All the Rage.
Q & A
1. Did you experience more difficulty writing one or the other, or did you like writing in one form more? How much of the novel did you write in chronological order, and how much did you jump around?
I enjoyed both of them. Writing Sadie's perspective was vert familiar to me because all of my books feature an intensely close first person, female point-of-view. Writing West's perspective, the podcast format, proved a little more challenging. Not so much because of the way it was written (scripts) but because each episode had to propel Sadie's narrative forward and give us a different way of looking at the things she went through.
So far, I've only ever been able to write in chronological order!
2. Was this how you always envisioned the book or did it change as you wrote it?
Regina Spektor said something really interesting about writing songs that I've always loved and related to as an author. She said, "[A]s soon as you try and take a song from your mind into piano and voice and into the real world, something gets lost and it's like a moment where, in that moment you forget how it was and it's this new way. And then when you make a record, even those ideas that you had, then those get all turned and changed. So in the end, I think, it just becomes its own thing and really I think a song could be recorded a million different ways and so what my records are, it just happened like that, but it's not like, this is how I planned it from the very beginning because I have no idea, I can't remember."
I feel something similar when writing - the heart of my idea remains intact, but the way it takes its ultimate form is always a little different (or even a lot different) than I might have been expecting, which makes it difficult to recall the starting point. But that's okay as long as the heart is still there and you're satisfied with and believe in what you've created.
3. What was the most surprising thing you learned in creating your characters? Which of your characters do you most identify with, and why?
When I first started Sadie, I was extremely skeptical of West - he had to prove himself to readers over the course of his narrative and given the nature of his job, I was curious to see where writing him would take me. I really loved the way his arc unfolded. I wasn't necessarily surprised by it, but more gratified by it than I realized I would be.
I identify with little pieces of all of my characters, but I like to keep those to myself because I don't want risk readers thinking about me while they read. I like my role as an author to be invisible.
4. What gave you the idea for SADIE?
One of the things that inspired Sadie was the way we consume violence against women and girls as a form of entertainment. When we do that, we reduce its victims to objets, which suggests a level of disposability - that a girl's pain is only valuable to us if we're being entertained to it. But it's not her responsibility to entertain us. What is our responsibility to us? I really wanted to explore that and the way we dismiss missing girls and what the cost of that ultimately is.
5. Do you have a favourite scene, quote, or moment from Sadie?
My favourite moment is a spoiler, but my favourite quote is this: "I wish this was a love story."
6. If you could tell your younger writing self-anything, what would it be?
I used to have an answer for this kind of question but the older I get, that's changed. I wouldn't tell her anything. Her experience as a writer unfolded the way it was supposed to and I like how it's turning out.
Excerpt
THE GIRLS
EPISODE 1
[THE GIRLS THEME]
WEST McCRAY:
Welcome to Cold Creek, Colorado. Population: eight hun-
dred.
Do a Google Image search and you’ll see its main street, the
barely beating heart of that tiny world, and find every other
building vacant or boarded up. Cold Creek’s luckiest—the
gainfully employed—work at the local grocery store, the gas
station and a few other staple businesses along the strip. The
rest have to look a town or two over for opportunity for them-
selves and for their children; the closest schools are in Park-
dale, forty minutes away. They take in students from three
other towns.
Beyond its main street, Cold Creek arteries out into worn and
chipped Monopoly houses that no longer have a place upon
the board. From there lies a rural sort of wilderness. The
4 courtney summers
highway out is interrupted by veins of dirt roads leading to
nowhere as often as they lead to pockets of dilapidated
houses or trailer parks in even worse shape. In the summer-
time, a food bus comes with free lunches for the kids until the
school year resumes, guaranteeing at least two subsidized
meals a day.
There’s a quiet to it that’s startling if you’ve lived your whole
life in the city, like I have. Cold Creek is surrounded by a beau-
tiful, uninterrupted expanse of land and sky that seem to go
on forever. Its sunsets are spectacular; electric golds and
oranges, pinks and purples, natural beauty unspoiled by the
insult of skyscrapers. The sheer amount of space is humbling,
almost divine. It’s hard to imagine feeling trapped here.
But most people here do.
COLD CREEK RESIDENT [FEMALE]:
You live in Cold Creek because you were born here and if
you’re born here, you’re probably never getting out.
WEST McCRAY:
That’s not entirely true. There have been some success sto-
ries, college graduates who moved on and found well-paying
jobs in distant cities, but they tend to be the exception and
not the rule. Cold Creek is home to a quality of life we’re
raised to aspire beyond, if we’re born privileged enough to
have the choice.
Here, everyone’s working so hard to care for their families and
keep their heads above water that, if they wasted time on the
petty dramas, scandals and personal grudges that seem to
define small towns in our nation’s imagination, they would
not survive. That’s not to say there’s no drama, scandal, or
sadie 5
grudge—just that those things are usually more than residents
of Cold Creek can afford to care about.
Until it happened.
The husk of an abandoned, turn-of-the-century one-room
schoolhouse sits three miles outside of town, taken by fire. The
roof is caved in and what’s left of the walls are charred. It sits
next to an apple orchard that’s slowly being reclaimed by the
nature that surrounds it: young overgrowth, new trees, wild-
flowers.
There’s almost something romantic about it, something that
feels like respite from the rest of the world. It’s the perfect
place to be alone with your thoughts. At least it was, before.
May Beth Foster—who you’ll come to know as this series goes
on—took me there herself. I asked to see it. She’s a plump,
white, sixty-eight-year-old woman with salt-and-pepper hair.
She has a grandmotherly way about her, right down to a voice
that’s so invitingly familiar it warms you from the inside out.
May Beth is manager of Sparkling River Estates trailer park, a
lifelong resident of Cold Creek, and when she talks, people
listen. More often than not, they accept whatever she says as
the truth.
MAY BETH FOSTER:
Just about . . . here.
This is where they found the body.
911 DISPATCHER [PHONE]:
911 dispatch. What’s your emergency?
Copyright © 2018 by Courtney Summers and reprinted by permission of Wednesday Books.
