A nineteen-year-old girl is marked as a runaway after she goes missing from Cold Creek, Colorado. That girl is Sadie Hunter, who left her small town on a mission: to track down the man who killed her sister Mattie. But what Sadie is unaware of is that while she searches for her sister’s murderer, she is being tracked down by a radio host named West McCray. West is determined to find Sadie and bring her home to Cold Creek where her surrogate grandmother, May Beth, and her mother, Claire (who is trying to restore their relationship), await her. Can Sadie get through her adventure without getting herself killed? Can West find Sadie before she too becomes a victim?

Sadie is a novel written by Ontario native, Courtney Summers. Sadie is Summers’ sixth novel. In this book, Summers wanted to shine a light on how people interact and consume media, especially when the media is focused around violence of girls and women.

To get Sadie’s story across, this novel is not written in chronological order. The novel is written in a split narrative. One of the perspectives is from the point-of-view of the main character Sadie which takes us through the events of her adventure as she is experiencing it. The second point of view is from our radio host West McCray. West tells Sadie’s story in the form of a radio podcast. Her story is not told in the order it happened, and since no one but Sadie knows the exact order of events, West’s point of view presents the events in whatever order he finds the evidence. This split perspective — where one narrator isn’t completely objective and the other narrator may be unreliable — makes the novel particularly interesting for the reader.

At first look, it seems as though Sadie Hunter is trying to cause trouble and get out of her small town, but as West devotes more time to finding her, the reader realizes what this cruel world is doing to her. Women and girls are frequently represented in the media as being associated with abuse and the hardships of life. Summers inspires people to continue to pay attention to all that happens and the actions people can take to make this world a better place. It will make you scared, disgusted, and filled with rage at the overall fictional story which could very easily become a reality in today’s world. If you enjoy true crime shows, such as Law and Order or Criminal Minds, this book is definitely something you should dive into. With its true-crime basis, you will not be able to put it down.

Summers aims to show people that there is too much violence in this world that often goes unnoticed or unaddressed. Sadie is a crime teen fiction novel that shows us the more disturbing side of today’s world and makes us think about what we might do to change things.