BookPage Teen Top Pick, September 2018
When Sadie was 6 years old, her sister Mattie’s arrival provided her life with purpose. So when Mattie is found dead 13 years later, Sadie is destroyed—and determined to bring her sister’s killer to justice, no matter the cost. Sadie’s car is soon found abandoned, and her surrogate grandmother, having given up on the authorities, begs investigative radio reporter West McCray to look into her granddaughter’s case. While West is reluctant to get involved with Sadie’s story (“Girls go missing all the time,” he says), he soon becomes obsessed with finding the 19-year-old and wants to help bring her home before it’s too late.
In the highly anticipated Sadie, Courtney Summers delivers a hard-hitting look at the depth of a sister’s love. Summers confronts drug abuse, abandonment and child sexual abuse head-on as she tells the dark story of Sadie’s desperate attempt to avenge her sister and West’s desperate attempt to find her.
Summers’ narrative alternates between Sadie’s first-person perspective of her journey and the script of West’s “Serial”-like podcast as he traces her steps, and both are riveting. Summers’ sharp prose—filled with raw emotion, gritty detail and almost-tangible suspense—will break readers’ hearts over and over for Sadie and just about everyone she encounters on her mission.
Sadie is a gripping, visceral thriller that is at once difficult to fathom and impossible to put down.
This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
