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 meagre 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.
Q & A with Courtney Summers:
1. Did you experience more difficulty writing
one or the other, or did you like writing in one form more? How much of the
novel did you write in chronological order, and how much did you jump around?
I enjoyed both of them. Writing
Sadie’s perspective was very familiar to me because all of my books feature an
intensely close first person, female point-of-view. Writing West’s perspective,
the podcast format, proved a little more challenging. Not so much because of
the way it was written (scripts) but because each episode had to propel Sadie’s
narrative forward and give us a different way of looking at the things she went
through.
So far, I’ve only ever been able to
write in chronological order!
2. Was this how you always envisioned the book
or did it change as you wrote it?
Regina Spektor said something
really interesting about writing songs that I’ve always loved and related to as
an author. She said, “[A]s soon as you try and take a song from your mind into
piano and voice and into the real world, something gets lost and it’s like a
moment where, in that moment you forget how it was and it’s this new way. And
then when you make a record, even those ideas that you had, then those get all
turned and changed. So in the end, I think, it just becomes its own thing and
really I think a song could be recorded a million different ways and so what my
records are, it just happened like that, but it’s not like, this is how I
planned it from the very beginning because I have no idea, I can’t remember.”
I feel something similar when
writing—the heart of my idea remains intact, but the way it takes its ultimate form
is always a little different (or even a lot different) than I might have been
expecting, which makes it difficult to recall the starting point. But that’s
okay as long as the heart is still there and you’re satisfied with and believe
in what you’ve created.
3. What was the most surprising thing you
learned in creating your characters? Which of your characters do you most
identify with, and why?
When I first started
Sadie, I was extremely skeptical of
West—he had to prove himself to readers over the course of his narrative and
given the nature of his job, I was curious to see where writing him would take
me. I really loved the way his arc unfolded. I wasn’t necessarily surprised by
it, but more gratified by it than I realized I would be.
I identify with
little pieces of all of my characters, but I like to keep those to myself
because I don’t want risk readers thinking about me while they read. I like my
role as an author to be invisible.
4. What gave you the idea for SADIE?
One of the things that inspired Sadie was the way we consume violence
against women and girls as a form of entertainment. When we do that, we reduce
its victims to objects, which suggests a level of disposability—that a girl’s
pain is only valuable to us if we’re being entertained by it. But it’s not her
responsibility to entertain us. What is our responsibility to us? I really
wanted to explore that and the way we dismiss missing girls and what the cost
of that ultimately is.
5. Do you have a favorite scene, quote, or
moment from Sadie?
My favorite moment is a spoiler,
but my favorite quote is this: “I wish this was a love story.”
6. If you could tell your younger writing
self-anything, what would it be?
I used to have an answer for this kind
of question but the older I get, that’s changed. I wouldn’t tell her anything.
Her experience as a writer unfolded the way it was supposed to and I like how
it’s turning out.
Review:
Sadie by Courtney Summers is an eye opener. This book is filled with so much sadness. When you come across the book, know this, Sadie is a very difficult book to read but you won’t want to put it down. I really like that Summers tackles some really difficult subjects.
A little about Sadie: Sadie has a younger sister named Mattie. Her mom is an addict that always has a new boyfriend. Sadie does not know who her father is. She is continually getting bullied at school for her stutter. Like I said, not an easy read. Then Sadie loses her favorite person in the world. Her sister.
This book deals with so much. If you want a book with hard subjects this is the one for you. Some of the subjects that are covered are neglect, abuse, sexual abuse, drugs, murder, revenge, heartache, the list goes on. From the very beginning of this book you know that Sadie is out for revenge. The author definitely gives you an easy way out.
I thought that the way the Summers wrote Sadie that it was super unique. The story is told through Sadie’s point of view and podcasts. This podcast is obsessed with Sadie and telling her story. I liked the dual narrative because we were able to see the outside of Sadie’s situation but at the same time we got to learn from Sadie herself.
This book is not an easy read at all. I thought it was very well written. Sometimes it can be tough reading or even writing about difficult subjects. I thought Courtney Summers did a wonderful job.
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
4 c o u r t n e y
s u m m e r s
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
s a di e 5
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?
More About The Girls Podcast:
THE GIRLS: Find Sadie is the first-ever YA thriller podcast. The Serial-like show is based off the novel Sadie by Courtney Summers. In a brilliant move, Summers scripted periodic chapters of the novel like a podcast script, hosted by fictional radio personality West McCray. The six-part podcast series brings these chapters to life with a 30+ person cast, music, and sound effects and was a collaboration between Macmillan Audio, Macmillan Podcasts, and Wednesday Books.
Episode 1 launches on August 1st, and the show will air seven weekly episodes available on all the major podcast platforms. The final episode will feature a bonus interview with Courtney Summers and her editor Sara Goodman.
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