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A review by hollidayreadswithme
Sadie by Courtney Summers
3.0
For more of my reviews, check out my book blog at www.readingreckless.wordpress.com.
SADIE by Courtney Summers is a book about a young girl on a mission to find the man who murdered her sister. The thing that makes this book unique is the podcast aspect of it. And although that is an interesting concept the execution gets lost in book form. In fact, it seems for the novel to be appreciated then it must be in audiobook form. At best, it’s a great marketing strategy as the audiobook has a full cast and musical accompaniment; at worst, it’s a way of stretching out a story that would most likely be around 150 pages and allows for telling instead of showing, a writing style I abhor.
The characters, for the most part, were utterly unlikeable. I didn’t get a chance to like them because the book didn’t expound on any character that Sadie came across apart from her perception of them. Which for the most part is very negative. There was a smattering of description of the business and residences of the small town of Coal Creek, but that came from the podcast so it was minimal.
The On the Road trope is at play here, in a way that doesn’t make sense until you realize that the stories are not being told concurrently. Maybe that is just something that I didn’t catch because I found myself fading in and out. Sadie’s story gripped me but the podcast angle didn’t bring anything to the table. A lot of the pieces he was fitting together were already set and because he was catching on after the reader, it didn’t feel like there was enough urgency. This mild curiosity peppered with his initial unwillingness to take the story made his attempts at finding her, even though he had a “team” on it, felt disingenuous. There were multiple times where he could have talked to the police about the crime scene and asked them to run any DNA through the state database. He spoke to exactly one police person.
I had an issue with a phrase. Sadie meets a woman who she describes having “dark black skin”. Summers makes a point of showing that Sadie is not easily helped, or rather no one helps her without being threatened or yelled at but the only decent woman who helps Sadie without asking questions is described as dark black. Not only is that sad because of the lack of representation, and yes, I know it’s very good of her to create a main character with a stutter. I’ve not really seen that before. But the only people of color in the book are Javi, who is considered weak by his friends (with whom Sadie tries to forge a weak romantic link), the bumbling police officer who really doesn’t do much to solve Mattie’s murder and the “dark black” woman. Their presence in the book is more than most, but still.
I’ve seen a lot of people have an issue with the ending. I’m not going to spoil it, but overwhelmingly I have seen reviews about how the ending fell flat or left them feeling the book was unfinished, but that was one of the only things that I liked about the book. The ending was left open which I believe is reflective of the subject matter of the book. Girls go missing all of the time. Most of the time they aren’t found. It’s a sad and heavy thing to think about but when you read a book like this, you have to be ready for your heart to break because either way, it will.
SADIE by Courtney Summers is a book about a young girl on a mission to find the man who murdered her sister. The thing that makes this book unique is the podcast aspect of it. And although that is an interesting concept the execution gets lost in book form. In fact, it seems for the novel to be appreciated then it must be in audiobook form. At best, it’s a great marketing strategy as the audiobook has a full cast and musical accompaniment; at worst, it’s a way of stretching out a story that would most likely be around 150 pages and allows for telling instead of showing, a writing style I abhor.
The characters, for the most part, were utterly unlikeable. I didn’t get a chance to like them because the book didn’t expound on any character that Sadie came across apart from her perception of them. Which for the most part is very negative. There was a smattering of description of the business and residences of the small town of Coal Creek, but that came from the podcast so it was minimal.
The On the Road trope is at play here, in a way that doesn’t make sense until you realize that the stories are not being told concurrently. Maybe that is just something that I didn’t catch because I found myself fading in and out. Sadie’s story gripped me but the podcast angle didn’t bring anything to the table. A lot of the pieces he was fitting together were already set and because he was catching on after the reader, it didn’t feel like there was enough urgency. This mild curiosity peppered with his initial unwillingness to take the story made his attempts at finding her, even though he had a “team” on it, felt disingenuous. There were multiple times where he could have talked to the police about the crime scene and asked them to run any DNA through the state database. He spoke to exactly one police person.
I had an issue with a phrase. Sadie meets a woman who she describes having “dark black skin”. Summers makes a point of showing that Sadie is not easily helped, or rather no one helps her without being threatened or yelled at but the only decent woman who helps Sadie without asking questions is described as dark black. Not only is that sad because of the lack of representation, and yes, I know it’s very good of her to create a main character with a stutter. I’ve not really seen that before. But the only people of color in the book are Javi, who is considered weak by his friends (with whom Sadie tries to forge a weak romantic link), the bumbling police officer who really doesn’t do much to solve Mattie’s murder and the “dark black” woman. Their presence in the book is more than most, but still.
I’ve seen a lot of people have an issue with the ending. I’m not going to spoil it, but overwhelmingly I have seen reviews about how the ending fell flat or left them feeling the book was unfinished, but that was one of the only things that I liked about the book. The ending was left open which I believe is reflective of the subject matter of the book. Girls go missing all of the time. Most of the time they aren’t found. It’s a sad and heavy thing to think about but when you read a book like this, you have to be ready for your heart to break because either way, it will.