Apparently I’ve discovered my favorite young adult subgenre, and it’s “angry books about what our crappy society does to girls”. In the last year all my favorite YA books books have fit into this wheelhouse. I don’t read a lot of young adult novels at all anymore, but when I find books that look like they might be similar to I Stop Somewhere, The Nowhere Girls, or Sawkill Girls, I always pick them up. This one didn’t disappoint.
The book follows Sadie, who is out to get revenge against the man she believes killed her little sister. Also following Sadie is a journalist and researcher who is trying to find out what happened to her and her little sister. Chapters alternate between Sadie’s perspective and transcriptions of the podcast episodes, which capture the tone of true-crime podcasts so perfectly I have to wonder if Summers has worked on one herself.
This book is really hard to read: it doesn’t shy away from what happened to Sadie, or to her sister, or from what happens to girls in this country every single day. It doesn’t shy away from how these crimes get dismissed, covered up, or straight up ignored. While I would have loved to see even more analysis about the societal forces behind this, and about rape culture, I understood while reading it that neither Sadie herself nor the podcast host, who means well but doesn’t fully get it, would be thinking about those issues. Plus, young adult books that are About Issues can sometimes fail when they start quoting statistics at us: it may be what we’d want to see added as adults, but it might not be what the intended audience wants to read. So I’m glad books like this exist.