Sadie

This story is gripping, although I couldn't rush through it due to the subject matter. It reminded me of The Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis.

Switching between The Girls podcast and Sadie's firsthand account is really clever. The reader has access to Sadie's personal experiences and memories, but her motives and backstory are not laid out because she's repressed a lot. Then you have episodes of the serial true crime podcast, where West is always at least one step behind Sadie. That being said, the podcast establishes connections and context through research and interviews.
The combination allows you to read certain chapters as Sadie herself, and other chapters as listeners of a podcast trying to figure out what happened to her. The narrative structure compliments points made about romanticization and/or dismissal of trauma, using a salient method of contemporary storytelling: podcasts.

At its core, this is a book about pain—whose pain is deemed par for the course, how we deal with pain when it becomes unbearable, how some of the ways we pretend to understand the pain others feel can dehumanize them and center our own discomfort.

Sadie is a suspenseful book with a dynamic protagonist who you feel for and root for even as her malicious intentions become more and more clear.