Blog Tour Review & Excerpt: Sadie by Courtney Summers

Hi everyone! We have something a little extra special for you on the blog today. In addition to a review of Sadie by Courtney Summers, we're part of the blog tour, which means we'll be posting an exclusive excerpt as well! So without further ado, let's get into it!

Title: Sadie
Author: Courtney Summers

Publisher: Wednesday Books
Rating: 4/5 Stars
Hardcover, 320 Pages
Publication Date: September 4th, 2018

Summary: A missing girl on a journey of revenge and a Serial-like podcast following the clues she's left behind. Sadie hasn't had an easy life. Growing up on her own, she's been raising her sister Mattie in an isolated small town, trying her best to provide a normal life and keep their heads above water. But when Mattie is found dead, Sadie's entire world crumbles. After a somewhat botched police investigation, Sadie is determined to bring her sister's killer to justice and hits the road following a few meager clues to find him. When West McCray—a radio personality working on a segment about small, forgotten towns in America—overhears Sadie's story at a local gas station, he becomes obsessed with finding the missing girl. He starts his own podcast as he tracks Sadie's journey, trying to figure out what happened, hoping to find her before it's too late.

I received an advanced copy of Sadie at BookExpo this year, and then I was lucky enough to get asked to participate in the blog tour, so it was definitely a win-win for me. And let me tell you, this is a book that you definitely need to put on your TBR if it isn't already on it. I know that's something I say a lot, but this time, I really mean it. You haven't lived until you've read this book. I've already started pushing it onto everybody that I know!

As the summary explains, Sadie's little sister, Mattie, turns up dead in a nearby orchard one day, and Sadie is so distraught that she knows she has to do something. Which is why she takes off in search of the murderer, ready to take his life at her own hands and make him feel the same pain Mattie felt. It's vengeance with a passion, and it's incredibly chilling. And while this is all happening, a nearby radio celebrity overhears the story and sets out to make a podcast explaining how the entire thing goes down.

This book was so thrilling, and it really took me on a ride. I'm not a fan of gory stories, so if that's what you're worried about, I can assure you that you don't have much to worry about in this book -- it's definitely more of a psychological thriller. But it really grips you and has you unable to resist flipping to the next page. I wanted to know what was going to come next in Sadie's journey and if she would succeed in finding her sister's killer and getting the revenge she'd been looking for.

I really admired Sadie's character throughout the story. She loved her sister so much that she was willing to go to nearly impossible lengths for her, no matter what the consequences were or what the stakes could be. That sisterly bond added a warm, almost loving element to such a dark and chilling story, which fleshed it out a lot more and made it feel all-encompassing in a way that I really appreciated as a reader.

Another thing that I really liked about this book was its format. Half of the book is told in Sadie's point of view, and the other half is told in a dialogue form as if you're reading the transcripts of the podcast about her disappearance. It was really fascinating to read both perspectives, because there was a lot of speculation in the podcast and a lot of stuff that Sadie knew and experienced that they didn't know about or understand completely. So I really got to see how heresay works and how stories can spiral out of control, while also witnessing the actual events firsthand through Sadie's eyes.

(Major spoilers ahead, so please skip to the next paragraph if you don't want this book ruined for you!) The ending of this book absolutely gutted me. While I want to be optimistic and say that Sadie got away, I don't think that she did, and I feel like that was a really bold move on Courtney Summers's part, and that it worked out very well. I sort of suspected that Sadie wasn't going to make it once I realized that the last few chapters were entirely in podcast form and not in Sadie's point of view, and even though I was really distraught about her potential death (lots of tears were involved, trust me), I was also satisfied with the fact that she got what she came for, and that Keith/Jack/Christopher/Darren paid the price for his horrible crimes.

Overall, I absolutely loved Sadie. I'm so glad that I found out about this book at BookExpo this year, and that I got to meet Courtney (who was super sweet), and also that I got to participate in the blog tour for this spectacular story! It gripped me from the very beginning and didn't let me go. It was also filled with tons of ups and downs, thrills and horrors. There are seriously so many important things tackled in this book, and Sadie's story is definitely one that needs to be told.

Hats off to Courtney Summers, because this book absolutely blew me away! And thank you to the awesome team at Wednesday Books for allowing us to be a part of this blog tour. :)

And now, it's time for an exclusive excerpt!

THE GIRLS

EPISODE 1

[THE GIRLS THEME]

WEST McCRAY:

Welcome to Cold Creek, Colorado. Population: eight hun- dred.

Do a Google Image search and you’ll see its main street, the barely beating heart of that tiny world, and find every other building vacant or boarded up. Cold Creek’s luckiest—the gainfully employed—work at the local grocery store, the gas station and a few other staple businesses along the strip. The rest have to look a town or two over for opportunity for them- selves and for their children; the closest schools are in Park- dale, forty minutes away. They take in students from three other towns.

Beyond its main street, Cold Creek arteries out into worn and chipped Monopoly houses that no longer have a place upon the board. From there lies a rural sort of wilderness. The highway out is interrupted by veins of dirt roads leading to nowhere as often as they lead to pockets of dilapidated houses or trailer parks in even worse shape. In the summer- time, a food bus comes with free lunches for the kids until the school year resumes, guaranteeing at least two subsidized meals a day.

There’s a quiet to it that’s startling if you’ve lived your whole life in the city, like I have. Cold Creek is surrounded by a beau- tiful, uninterrupted expanse of land and sky that seem to go on forever. Its sunsets are spectacular; electric golds and oranges, pinks and purples, natural beauty unspoiled by the insult of skyscrapers. The sheer amount of space is humbling, almost divine. It’s hard to imagine feeling trapped here.

But most people here do.

COLD CREEK RESIDENT [FEMALE]:

You live in Cold Creek because you were born here and if you’re born here, you’re probably never getting out.

WEST McCRAY:

That’s not entirely true. There have been some success sto- ries, college graduates who moved on and found well-paying jobs in distant cities, but they tend to be the exception and not the rule. Cold Creek is home to a quality of life we’re raised to aspire beyond, if we’re born privileged enough to have the choice.

Here, everyone’s working so hard to care for their families and keep their heads above water that, if they wasted time on the petty dramas, scandals and personal grudges that seem to define small towns in our nation’s imagination, they would not survive. That’s not to say there’s no drama, scandal, or grudge—just that those things are usually more than residents of Cold Creek can afford to care about.

Until it happened.

The husk of an abandoned, turn-of-the-century one-room schoolhouse sits three miles outside of town, taken by fire. The roof is caved in and what’s left of the walls are charred. It sits next to an apple orchard that’s slowly being reclaimed by the nature that surrounds it: young overgrowth, new trees, wild- flowers.

There’s almost something romantic about it, something that feels like respite from the rest of the world. It’s the perfect place to be alone with your thoughts. At least it was, before.

May Beth Foster—who you’ll come to know as this series goes on—took me there herself. I asked to see it. She’s a plump, white, sixty-eight-year-old woman with salt-and-pepper hair. She has a grandmotherly way about her, right down to a voice that’s so invitingly familiar it warms you from the inside out. May Beth is manager of Sparkling River Estates trailer park, a lifelong resident of Cold Creek, and when she talks, people listen. More often than not, they accept whatever she says as the truth.

MAY BETH FOSTER:

Just about . . . here.

This is where they found the body.

911 DISPATCHER [PHONE]:

911 dispatch. What’s your emergency?

I'd like to thank the awesome team over at Wednesday Books for allowing me to be a part of this blog tour and letting me share this special excerpt and my review with all of you guys. If Sadie isn't on your TBR already, it definitely should be, because this is a gripping thriller that you definitely don't want to miss!