But, I'm getting ahead of myself.
First, if the title of this blog post didn't clue you in - I'm going to be giving ALL the spoilers. ALL OF THEM. There's no way for me to talk about this book, my disappointment in this book, without talking about the ending.
Also, trigger warnings for childhood sexual abuse. I wouldn't describe it as graphic, but it is upsetting which...of course it is. Now, on to my rant...
Sadie Hunter has been on her own since the day she was born to a drug addicted mother. When she's six, Mom gets pregnant again, giving birth to Mattie. Sadie adores Mattie. She's the kind of golden child that everyone dotes on. Mom favors Mattie and neglects Sadie (for reasons) but that doesn't mean she's a competent mother to Mattie either - so Sadie, already struggling with a severe stutter that Mom refused to get her help for, is raising herself and Mattie with some help from a kindly grandmother figure who lives in the trailer next door. Then, one day, Mom abandons them for parts unknown, Mattie is found dead in a field, and Sadie takes off to find the man she knows is responsible.
Sadie takes off without word, worrying the kindly grandmother figure next door who can't deal with "another dead girl." Entering stage left is a NPR-style journalist, West McCray, who overhears the story of Sadie and Mattie and decides to work the angle of the missing Sadie into a podcast called "The Girls."
The audio book is a multi-narrator extravaganza and the book is broken up between chapters from Sadie's point of view, to podcast chapters of West reconstructing Sadie's trail months after the fact. It's clever, engrossing, and if you're a fan of true crime podcasts you will likely love it. I cannot recommend the audio production highly enough. I'm normally not wild about multi-narrator (thank you erotic romance for killing that for me...) audio books, but wow. This one is great. A+ all the way around.
So where did it all go horribly wrong? The ending. You've got a 19-year-old girl on a vigilante mission to find the guy who sexually abused her as a kid (one of Mom's horrible boyfriends, because, of course), and finds a nest of snakes everywhere she goes. This guy had blown back into town right before Mattie's murder, so Sadie KNOWS (again, for reasons) that he's the guy, he has to die, and she's going to be the one to kill him. So what happens?
She finds The Bad Guy. And then we're back to the podcast. What we know? The Bad Guy came home disheveled and dirty telling his new girlfriend he just had to sleep. She finds him about 24 hours later, dead from a knife wound in his side that became infected. What happened to Sadie? Did she get away? Did he bury her somewhere?
WE NEVER FIND OUT!!!!!! She's still missing at the end of the book. Great, the bad guy is dead. Huzzah. BUT WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED TO OUR MAIN PROTAGONIST?!?!??!!?!?!?!?
Will there be a sequel? Oh who the heck knows at the this point. I DON'T FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS TO SADIE AND NOW I WANT TO SMASH THINGS AND THROAT PUNCH EVERYBODY!!!!!!
So what started out as an engrossing read, a YA thriller that I would have killed for when I was a teen, turns into WTFBBQ JUST HAPPENED AND I HATE EVERYBODY!
This is a genre book. Genre = readers want a g-d ending. This open-ended garbage needs to die in a fiery pit the heat of a thousand blazing suns.
Yeah, I'm a tinch annoyed.
Final Grade = D
