Rose Quartz Reads: Sadie // an analysis of our cultural obsession with dead girls

Sadie is a devastating masterpiece. I have read it twice this year alone, and both times left me tearful and hoping desperately that there was more. It wasn't just the story that gripped me - it was the uncomfortable messages that came with it that made this a book I cannot stop thinking about.

Synopsis

When Sadie's little sister Mattie is murdered, she leaves her small town for revenge. Twelve months later, radio host, West McCray hears Sadie's story. He follows her footsteps to find out what happened to the girls, sharing his findings in a podcast in the hopes that it will help bring Sadie home. But what West doesn't anticipate is the deeper darkness surrounding this story, one that speaks to a bigger truth about missing girls; how we only care about the pretty lies, wilfully ignoring the ugly truth that surrounds them and our obsession with them.

The Dead Girl Story

I'm going to approach this review a little differently than the ones I've written before. Instead of running through the plot and characters, I want to do a reading of this book framed by what I'm going to refer to as 'Dead Girl Theory'. This theory is one that is posed by Alice Bolin in her book of essays, Dead Girls. Her essays talk about our cultural obsession with the figure of the dead girl across all media, particularly television. She writes:

"All Dead Girl Shows begin with the discovery of the murdered body of a young woman. The lead characters of the series are attempting to solve the (often impossibly complicated) mystery of who killed her. As such, the Dead Girl is not a "character" in the show, but rather, the memory of her is." (Bolin, p14)

In this sense, West McCray's podcast The Girls is a Dead Girl Show. It begins with the death of Mattie Southern and promises an investigation into her death and Sadie's disappearance. West is set up to be our detective protagonist whilst Mattie and Sadie are a convenient backdrop. Thus "there can be no redemption for the Dead Girl, but it is available to the person who is solving her murder" (Bolin, p18).

At least, that is how the story traditionally goes. But Summers completely shifts the story on its axis when she gives Sadie a voice.

Sadie as a Dead Girl with autonomy

"And it begins, as so many stories do, with a dead girl." (Summers, p1)

For all intents and purposes, Sadie is a Dead Girl. The story would be much easier to digest if she were dead. But by alternating between transcripts of The Girls and Sadie's narrative voice, Summers lets us grow to understand Sadie in a way that West's outside perspective cannot provide. Sadie has more autonomy than the Dead Girls Bolin writes about. She is not a mystery to be uncovered, nor is she a way for us to self-reflect or ponder over. This is made clear when West states that the crime's "violence and brutality do not exist for your entertainment" (Summers, p6). We see Sadie as a living, breathing girl, and in that way, Summers prevents us from romanticising her in the way that Dead Girl stories often fall victim to.

In turn, Sadie's voice lets us understand the actual Dead Girl, Mattie, not as the "perfect victim [...] the highest sacrifice, the virgin martyr" (Bolin, p22-23), but as a flawed and messy human. Sadie and Mattie are poor. They have no father and their mother prioritised her drug addiction over them until she left them. Sadie gave everything to raising Mattie as best she could. Mattie was her world, but like sisters, they fought constantly. This imperfection in their lives and within their relationship isn't what we expect from the Dead Girl Story. Mattie isn't the perfect Dead Girl, and the result is that the story is very grounded and human, feeling tragically true-to-life - even more than the real true-crime podcasts our society fixates on.

The 'mystery' of violent men

Bolin also writes about our cultural fascination with psychopaths. She quotes Jess Walter, who talks about how serial killers like Hannibal Lecter are designed to be "attractively terrifying" when "his interactions with real-life psychopaths revealed them to be anything but charming geniuses: they were instead "the kind of broken, weak-minded loser who preys on women on the fringe of society"" (Bolin, p32).

Summers steers clear of suggesting that the predatory characters in her novel are in any way geniuses. The only reason the abusive characters in her novel get away with their actions for so long is this: people selectively choose to not believe girls. As a child, Sadie made it very clear that she despised her mother's boyfriend at the time. But the people closest to her chose to ignore this because it is much easier to accept that girls are being dramatic rather seeing malicious men as they truly are. The abusers in this story aren't complex, cunning individuals - they are simply monsters hiding in the plain sight of society's wilful ignorance.

The true experiences vs the privileged narrator

The structuring of this book is ingenious. Although we encounter the podcast transcripts before Sadie's chapters, West is always a step behind understanding the true nature of Sadie's disappearance. At the start of my review, I wrote that Sadie leaves home to enact revenge, but I feel like that belittles the journey she goes on between her home of Cold Creek and her ultimate destination. She is seeking justice, all the while West is seeking answers, many of which he never gets. He knows from the people still in Sadie's life that she has a stutter, but he doesn't get to suffer through the ableism Sadie has faced daily since childhood. Sadie's chapters are human, whereas West's transcripts only scratch the surface of being fully genuine - at least that's the case at the start.

"Girls go missing all the time [...] I wanted a story that felt fresh, new and exciting and what about a missing teenage girl was that? We'd heard this story before." (Summers, p15)

Girls go missing all the time, and we either got used to it, choose to ignore it, or serialise it. But as the book progressed, I was fascinated by the subtle shifts in West's narration, demonstrating more feeling than what one would expect from an impartial narrator. His privilege in viewing this story as an outsider is something that he is forced to acknowledge by the novel's end, and it is as jarring for him as it is for the reader - because we are being addressed, too.

"You look [at us] like we're such poor little fools. You think you can take our pain, turn it into something for yourself. A show. A show..." (Summers, p267)

My conclusions

Summers does a brilliant job of avoiding sensationalising the darker aspects of this book. There are obviously limits to what kind of content can be written for a YA audience, but I argue that with Sadie, it is more than simply skirting around the ugly for the sake of the readership. There is of course value in having stories like Sadie's put into more specific words for victims of similar experiences, but often narratives choose to ignore this, electing to sensationalise a traumatic lived experience. Instead, Summers makes the reader take a more introspective look at how this kind of story is often told, forcing us to question what draws us to them in the first place.

The author blends compelling storytelling with a kind of humanity that I find many mystery novels lack. This is brought to life all the more eloquently by the outstanding voice acting of the audiobook, which features a full cast and, in my opinion (having both read and listened to it), is the best way to consume the novel. Sadie is a brilliant story in every regard, from the story to its characters to what lies beneath, and I cannot recommend it enough.