Sadie; Courtney Summers

While I have a hard time classifying “Sadie” as the thriller it’s listed as, it’s such a heart wrenching and beautifully told mystery that I’m going to mostly ignore the lack of “thriller” aspects. Sadie is a young woman on a crusade to find her sister’s killer, and perhaps heal a teeny tiny bit from her own horrific abuse (trigger warning for child sexual assault and pedophilia). Sadie has been through the worst life has to offer, but she lives for Mattie, her younger sister. Sadie develops the fierce maternal instincts she wishes she had in return from her own mother, who was absent at best due to her alcohol and drug addiction. So, when Mattie is brutally taken from Sadie, she believes there is nothing left of her; her heart, her soul, her LIFE, have been torn out and the only option she sees is to find the person responsible and give them a bit of an “eye for an eye” style justice. Sadie knows, when she starts out on this quest that, if she succeeds, she’ll never be the same, that the hunt for the truth and justice and retribution will change her forever. But she also knows success isn’t guaranteed. And while it took me a bit to appreciate the podcast style duel POV, I absolutely adored the way Sadie’s trauma and grief were presented (and yes, I know that sounds weird).

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Sadie and Mattie’s story is, sadly, not uncommon. In fact, the podcast host main character admits as much from the very start. Girls go missing all the time and unless they’re the right kind of girl from the right kind of place, no one seems to care. Sadie and her sister are not the right kind of girls. Growing up poor in a forgotten little town on the brink of financial ruin, the police don’t seem to be trying that hard to find Mattie’s killer. And that’s where the initial podcast style of the story gets a bit confusing. Because, to start, it’s hard to know what the timeline is between Sadie and West. It wasn’t until that timeline seemed to get cemented with when West is in the story, to where Sadie is when we’re back in her chapters, that the two POV's really clicked for me. I’d say it’s not until about the 40% mark where the podcast section and Sadie’s sections align and the book becomes really cohesive with it’s story telling between West getting more and more distressed the longer he’s on Sadie’s trail, to the bone tired, desperate yearning Sadie has to catch up to the person responsible for taking Mattie away before her anguish and trauma consume her.

The way Sadie shares her grief, the way her suffering raised her, and even the stutter she can’t outgrow, was written in such a beautifully tragic way that my heart ached throughout the entire story. And while for Sadie there is no mystery around who killed her sister, unraveling the mystery of how this person came into their life and disappeared, as well as the solid portrayal of how deceptive abusers can be, is as close as the story gets to being a “thriller”. Sadie is relentless in her search in a way that is so agonizing because it shows the lengths that a sister will go to in order to avenge the one person they had in their lives who they could love unconditionally. Unfortunately, there’s not much else I can say without risking spoilers. But because it did take a bit for me to get into the story structure, and that I was, initially, expecting a bit more from the thriller side of things, I’m giving this 4 stars just for how brutally honest the author gets with showing Sadie’s fierce grief. The last thing I’ll say though, is that the ending is one I think I’ll be analyzing for a very, very long time