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A review by sarahscupofcoffee
Sadie by Courtney Summers
5.0
Read this review and more at sarahthebooknerd.home.blog!
This book is not for the faint of heart. There are some heavy topics, so be prepared for that.
Sadie is one of the best teen books I've read in a long time. There are so many things I loved about this book.
For starters, I loved the genre. It's young adult fiction, which is an incredibly vast genre (which I know I've talked about in my other reviews). YA has so many sub-genres and age ranges that it's supposed to hit, so it's like a game for authors to hit as many qualities as possible without the book exploding. These are the ones that Summers hit: realistic fiction, age range seventh grade through adult, sensitive issues, minimum profanity (which is huge seeing that it hits sensitive issues), mystery, thriller, cross-formatting (I don't know if that's a word, but it is now), and binge-worthy. It's difficult to hit this many pegs in YA without throwing the believability of your novel out the window.
I adored the podcast integration. The novel switched between a podcast, written similar to a screenplay-ish, and Sadie's perspective. The podcast tells us where the case is at in the present tense, while Sadie's perspective shoots us back to when the occurrences were taking place. Brilliant. The pacing was beautifully done, leaving plenty of information for the reader to mull over. One of my biggest pet peeves is when an author doesn't let us come to our own conclusions as readers. Summers doesn't do that. She allows us to fill in the blanks on our own, with gentle nudging from the podcast's host, West.
Speaking of Summers... her writing is top-notch. There were lines in here that made me clutch my chest and remind myself to breathe because I had forgotten how to. No spoiler, but for example, in one scene a character discovers something awful. She ends the chapter with, "I watched him age."
She ends chapters brilliantly, too. This is a binge-reading worthy novel. I didn't want to binge read it, but I kind of did. It's hard for me to find a book that keeps me in the bath tub for longer than twenty minutes. I spent over an hour with this book... multiple times. The podcast parts are easy to read through the pages go quickly, but Sadie's parts are dense and they tear up your stomach. It's a gorgeous mixture of style.
Alright, there is something I didn't like though. I was eating this story up right until the very end. Until the end. I hated the ending. I wanted more of a wrap up than what I received. It left a bitter taste in my mouth and I literally said, "Really?" out loud in a silent room.
This book is not for the faint of heart. There are some heavy topics, so be prepared for that.
Sadie is one of the best teen books I've read in a long time. There are so many things I loved about this book.
For starters, I loved the genre. It's young adult fiction, which is an incredibly vast genre (which I know I've talked about in my other reviews). YA has so many sub-genres and age ranges that it's supposed to hit, so it's like a game for authors to hit as many qualities as possible without the book exploding. These are the ones that Summers hit: realistic fiction, age range seventh grade through adult, sensitive issues, minimum profanity (which is huge seeing that it hits sensitive issues), mystery, thriller, cross-formatting (I don't know if that's a word, but it is now), and binge-worthy. It's difficult to hit this many pegs in YA without throwing the believability of your novel out the window.
I adored the podcast integration. The novel switched between a podcast, written similar to a screenplay-ish, and Sadie's perspective. The podcast tells us where the case is at in the present tense, while Sadie's perspective shoots us back to when the occurrences were taking place. Brilliant. The pacing was beautifully done, leaving plenty of information for the reader to mull over. One of my biggest pet peeves is when an author doesn't let us come to our own conclusions as readers. Summers doesn't do that. She allows us to fill in the blanks on our own, with gentle nudging from the podcast's host, West.
Speaking of Summers... her writing is top-notch. There were lines in here that made me clutch my chest and remind myself to breathe because I had forgotten how to. No spoiler, but for example, in one scene a character discovers something awful. She ends the chapter with, "I watched him age."
She ends chapters brilliantly, too. This is a binge-reading worthy novel. I didn't want to binge read it, but I kind of did. It's hard for me to find a book that keeps me in the bath tub for longer than twenty minutes. I spent over an hour with this book... multiple times. The podcast parts are easy to read through the pages go quickly, but Sadie's parts are dense and they tear up your stomach. It's a gorgeous mixture of style.
Alright, there is something I didn't like though. I was eating this story up right until the very end. Until the end. I hated the ending. I wanted more of a wrap up than what I received. It left a bitter taste in my mouth and I literally said, "Really?" out loud in a silent room.