Jane Austen’s piercing comedy of manners provides the ideal template for Ibi Zoboi’s shrewd, timely second novel - her first, “American Street,” was a National Book Award finalist - though, for Zuri, “pride” is more often a strength than a weakness. Hers is not a comforting story, but it’s one that needs to be told. Summers ingeniously alternates between the podcast version of events and Sadie’s fierce present-tense account of her time on the road tracking the sexual predator she vows to make pay for the damage he did to her, to her sister and, she suspects, to other young girls. Unlike the standard binge-able tale, West’s perspective does not completely shape the narrative, because Sadie gets to have her say. It’s hard to imagine feeling trapped here. … The sheer amount of space is humbling, almost divine.

Host West McCray, a New Yorker, spreads the tropes thick, managing to both belittle and romanticize at the same time, as when he says about Cold Creek, “There’s a quiet to it that’s startling if you’ve lived your whole life in the city, like I have. The novel opens with script from the first episode of “The Girls,” a (fictional) podcast that promises to investigate the murder of 13-year-old Mattie Southern from Cold Creek, Colo., and the disappearance soon thereafter of her 19-year-old sister, Sadie Hunter.

Books like sadie by courtney summers