Listen to the First Chapter:
Awards:
New York Times Bestseller
2019 Edgar Award for Best YA Mystery
A Booklist Top 10 YA Book for Adult Readers
One of the Best YA Novels of 2018 by Publishers Weekly
One of B&N Teen Blog's Best YA Books of 2018
Bustle's Best Young Adult Books of 2018
Good Morning America's Best Books of 2018
In NPR's Guide to 2018's Greatest Reads
In Paste's 30 Best Young Adult Novels of 2018
Nominated for YALSA's 2019 Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers
From the Book Jacket:
When popular radio personality, West McCray receives a desperate phone call from a stranger imploring him to find nineteen-year-old run-away Sadie Hunter, he's not convinced there's a story there; girls go missing all the time. But as soon as West's boss discovers Sadie fled home after the brutal murder of her little sister, Mattie, he sees the makings of something big and orders West to the small town of Cold Creek, Colorado, to uncover what happened.
Sadie has not idea that her story will soon become the subject of a blockbuster podcast. She just wants revenge. Armed with a switchblade, Sadie follows a meager set of clues hoping they'll lead to the man who took Mattie's life, because she's determined to make him pay for it with his own. But as West traces her journey to the darkest, most dangerous corners of big cities and small towns, a deeply unsettling mystery begins to unfold -- one that's bigger than them both. Can he find Sadie before it's too late?
Alternating between Sadie's unflinching voice as she hunts the killer and the podcast transcripts tracking the clues she's left behind, Sadie is a breathless thriller about the lengths we go to to protect the ones we loves and the high price we pay when we can't. It will haunt you long after you reach the final page.
Reviews:
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.
-- Kirkus Reviews
“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. -- Publishers Weekly