"the worst has already happened."

as expected, extremely triggering for older sisters. but that's not why i'm giving it 5 stars. i don't judge a story by its level of sadness or the number of hard-hitting topics it discusses. i'm giving it 5 stars due to the fact that i can't remember ever being this impressed by a young adult book. i liked Six of Crows and A Deadly Education just fine, but they still felt pretty ya to me. this one forgets to remind you, except for two, maybe three instances, none related to characterization. a young protagonist who acts like it, and an author more concerned with portraying her in honesty than selling her to other young people. one week since finishing the book and i still catch myself missing Sadie. that feeling of watching Tár not quite believing Lydia Tár isn't real because not many people feel that expansive. as if they expanded the world a litte. except that Sadie is completely unremarkable, only remembered for her stutter. it's her, a stolen knife and broken words. she doesn't want to be remembered, however, she wants to be dangerous. she wants it so bad, the way only someone who always has to protect without ever being safe could. a wish hard to grant and hard to forget.

another thing that made this a memorable reading experience for me was the full-cast audiobook: it edges perfection. i had always planned to listen to it so i could better immerse myself in the podcast episodes that intertwine the chapters narrated by the protagonist. this meta quality provides the sole reason for Sadie to have endured on my tbr, as i couldn't care less about true crime podcasts and rarely pick up books of this genre (the who-did-it, what-happens-next, where-do-we-go-now type of books) or with this thematic (calling all women to read and rant about the real-life nightmare that could happen to them at any moment! what? you don’t like literature?). thankfully, everything is dealt with care: the narrative haunts the reader without being graphic, and the side characters' perceptions of the abusers bare a heartbreaking plausibility. furthermore, the audiobook enhances the story's format —a girl on a mission versus the investigation that follows her traces months late— so the atmosphere is also on point.

even more striking is the contrast between Sadie’s stutter and her fierce, almost vicious inner voice that gets tender bit by bit once she starts thinking about her murdered sister. she's always ready to put her knife to use and cut through whatever meat blocking her way (or at least she thinks she is, urges herself to be); then comes a memory or some vision of the past engraved in her subconsciousness and projected onto the world –for there are Sadies and Matties everywhere– combined with a yearning she can’t completely vanquish, and her narration takes a different color, becomes somewhat dreamy, a bit surreal. it’s a shame when Courtney Summers breaks the spell to remind us of the ya label attached to her book and explain that these visions are just Sadie’s trauma resurfacing. anyone can figure that out by themselves and still be caught off guard every time it happens as the memories pop up so naturally yet so abruptly our first thought is that we’re meeting new characters or passing strangers by. the author found a great way of incorporating flashbacks without the usual dullness that comes with them, so there was no need to show her hand like that (elements of the story that could use an actual explanation, like the mother’s motivations, get none). anyhow, the audiobook’s cast doesn’t waste all the groundwork and makes an already good story shine bright. now i wonder if the text alone would've been this dazzling. i know that last line wouldn’t have hit me as hard.