Sadie

Starred review from August 6, 2018
“I can’t take another dead girl.” That’s why May Beth Foster asks radio reporter West McCray to help find 19-year-old Sadie, May Beth’s trailer park neighbor and honorary granddaughter. Sadie took off from her home in Cold Creek, Colo., when Mattie, the 13-year-old sister she practically raised, was murdered. (Their mother, an addict whose boyfriends came and went, is absent.) Despite a stutter that’s gotten her teased and bullied, Sadie is brave unto recklessness, and she won’t rest until she finds the man she thinks killed her sister. West, initially reluctant to get involved, lets May Beth’s grief and his boss’s urging to start a podcast goad him into starting the search for Sadie. The resulting true-crime podcast alternates with Sadie’s first-person narration from the road, West’s knowledge usually lagging behind what readers know from traveling with the driven, grieving Sadie. Initially distracting, the podcast becomes an effective way to build out backstory and let myriad characters have their say. The result is a taut, suspenseful book about abuse and power that feels personal, as if Summers (All the Rage), like May Beth and West, can’t take one more dead or abused girl. Readers may well feel similarly. Ages 13–up. Agent: Amy Tipton, FinePrint.

August 1, 2018

Gr 9 Up-Nineteen-year-old Sadie Hunter is going to kill the man who murdered her 13-year-old sister, Mattie. So begins the latest compelling work by Summers (All the Rage). The book alternates between Sadie's first-person perspective as she crisscrosses Colorado in search of Keith, who sexually abused her when he dated her mother and who she believes murdered Mattie, and the transcript of a serialized podcast called The Girls. The podcast, set in the future after Sadie's car has been found abandoned with her belongings inside, details a New York City radio host's search for her. His interviews with her family and those who crossed her path provide an outsider's perspective to Sadie's actions and interior monologue, expanding on themes of revenge, ineffective policing, poverty, and addiction and its impact on parenting. Both story lines propel the plot and provide context. The book touches often on the fallacies of how we perceive and judge others, notably in the way Sadie is judged for her stutter, which also further isolates her on her journey. The fresh, nuanced, and fast-moving narrative will appeal to a range of YA and new adult readers, and serves as a larger examination on the way society interacts with true crime. Is it ethical that the podcast-with its money and investigative resources Sadie's poor family lacks-tells her story without her consent? Readers will likewise hope that Sadie, unlike so many missing girls, finds her way home. However, as in the case with too many of those victims, this book's conclusion doesn't tie up neatly. VERDICT It's impossible to not be drawn into this haunting thriller of a book. A heartrending must-have.-Amanda Mastrull, Library Journal

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2018
Grades 9-12 When Sadie's sister, Mattie, is found dead in a field, it's the last straw. Sadie's life has been hard?she lives in a dead-end town, her drug-addicted mother abandoned her and her sister, she's constantly mocked for her stutter, and her childhood was plagued with a string of abusive men?but she can't stand to watch her sister's case slip through the cracks of a disinterested police force. With nothing left to lose, she takes matters into her own hands, packing light and tracing a scanty trail of breadcrumbs toward the man she knows is responsible for Mattie's death. But Sadie's disappearance doesn't go unnoticed. Soon a true-crime podcast is on the case, and its host, New York journalist West McCray, interviews Sadie's friends and neighbors in an attempt to both tell Sadie's story and trace her whereabouts before there's another dead girl. Alternating between transcripts of the podcast and Sadie's first-person account of her investigation, Summers' novel is filled with her trademark biting commentary on sexual assault and the mistreatment of girls and women at the hands of predatory men. Occasionally, in Sadie's narrative, memories of her own trauma bubble up and offer candid insight into her larger motivations. Of course, West misses those parts of Sadie's story, since he's working with very limited information. By the time the novel ends, neither West nor the reader can land on a solid, tidy explanation of what happened to Sadie. Though Sadie's story is occasionally a bit overwrought, her hunt for Mattie's killer is captivating, and Summers excels at slowly unspooling both Sadie's and West's investigations at a measured, tantalizing pace. Though Summers' novel isn't true crime, per se, it's impossible to not see its connections to the recent surge in the popularity of the genre, which is having quite the moment, thanks to podcasts like Serial and TV shows like Making a Murderer and The Jinx, to name only a few. West, an affluent, educated man, gets called out for his fascination with Sadie's case toward the end of the book, when Sadie's mother reappears: You think you can take our pain, turn it into something for yourself. . . . I've been used by men my whole life, and you want the truth, I don't think you're going to be any different. This dovetails with the notion that true crime comes from a place of prurient interest in the gory details of crime. Although that's certainly a facet of the genre, it doesn't seem to be the whole story here: Sadie and her family, along with West, are dismayed by the lack of attention and care their case gets from local law enforcement. Sadie embarks on her mission because, in her eyes, justice hasn't been served for Mattie, and West, in turn, follows a parallel trail to find justice for Sadie. The distrust of the official narrative of the justice system seems to be just as big a part of true crime as fascination with the gory details. The fact that elements of true crime, particularly the subgenre that seeks to investigate unanswered questions in official accounts, have made their way into YA should not be a surprise. There's a small but healthy contingent of YA true crime already out there: Alexis Coe's Alice and Freda Forever (2014) recounts a Victorian-era murder case involving two teenage girls embroiled in a lesbian love affair; Sarah Miller's The Borden Murders (2016) closely examines the infamous Lizzie Borden case; and Dashka Slater's award-winning The 57 Bus (2017) spotlights a gruesome hate crime. Simon & Schuster has a whole imprint, Simon True, dedicated to teen-oriented true crime, and the imprint is on its third title, with a fourth due out later this year. Fiction that takes its narrative cues...

January 1, 2019
This intricately plotted, irony-heavy thriller alternates between two narratives: one from the perspective of the title character, who's hell-bent on finding and killing her younger sister Mattie's murderer; and one that's the transcript of a Serial-like true-crime podcast that starts after Sadie's car is found abandoned. The narratives work in tandem to create a suspenseful picture of a brave young woman with a traumatic past.

(Copyright 2019 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

Starred review from July 1, 2018
Sadie is seeking her sister's killer; months later, podcast producer West McCray seeks to learn why Sadie abandoned her car and vanished.When Mattie was born to Claire, a white, drug-addicted, single mother, Sadie, 6, became her de facto parent. Her baby sister's love filled a hole in Sadie's fiercely protective heart. Claire favored Mattie, who remained attached to her long after Claire disappeared from their grim, trailer-park home in rural Colorado. Sadie believes that Mattie's determination to find Claire--which Sadie opposed--led to her brutal murder at age 13. Now 19, Sadie sets out to find and kill the man she holds responsible for her sister's murder. Interwoven with Sadie's first-person account is the transcript of McCray's podcast series, The Girls, tracking his efforts to learn what's happened to Sadie, prompted and partly guided by the sisters' sympathetic neighbor. West's off-the-record conversations are also included. Sadie is smart, observant, tough, and at times heartbreakingly vulnerable, her interactions mediated by a profound stutter. In the podcast, characters first seen through Sadie's ruthless eyes further reveal (or conceal) their interactions and motives. Like Salla Simukka's Lumikki Andersson, Sadie's a powerful avatar: the justice-seeking loner incarnated as a teenage girl. Sadie exempts no one--including herself--from her unsparing judgment. Conveyed indirectly through its effect on victims, child sexual abuse permeates the novel as does poverty's intergenerational legacy.A riveting tour de force. (Thriller. 14-18)

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