REVIEWS: Dry and Sadie

Dry:

I was recently introduced to the works of Neal Shusterman when last year, I read the Scythe Series by him. And now when he brings out a book with his son, I was so happy to read it. I wanted to read it as soon as I could. In the end of me, I decided to listen to it as an audio book. And honestly, I am so glad I did.

This story follows our main character, Alyssa. We meet our protagonist in a time of crisis, when the tap out has already begun. The tap out is when the people have restrictions on water usage. Say like, don’t fill up your swimming pool or water the grass etc. But when things like this happen, it’s bound to go awfully wrong and disastrous and that’s exactly what happens. The taps run dry. Suddenly everything turns into a post-apocalyptic world, where the only thing that matters is finding water.

This book deals with an issue that is near to our future. Considering how much is going on in this day and age, it could be within the next five years or so. When you come to that realization when you are reading it, it’s such weird emotion to feel. It does want to make you do something about it. I mean people are without clean water in Flint right now, so this is definitely happening to people. When I was reading it, it actually made me feel so thirsty, to now what these characters are going through in a small detail. Ever since reading this, I’ve tried to use a little water as possible. It’s impacted my life in such a big way.

Dry has such impeccable writing and Neal and Jarrod did such an amazing job on this book. And even writing this review, it’s making me want to stay hydrated. Such a marvellous book.

4 out of 5 stars.

Sadie:

This book was recommended on booktube so I thought I would give it a go. It is best read as an audiobook as it introduces a podcast narrative, so listening to the actual podcast in the book was fascinating.

We follow our main character, Sadie, the namesake of the book, who hasn’t had a great life growing up. Her mum has always been dipping in and out of her life due to the drug abuse that she continually does. So that leaves Sadie looking out and taking care for her younger sister Mattie. But when Mattie is found dead, Sadie goes on a journey to find the person that did that to her younger sister. In her mind, they must pay for what they did. She has chosen to bring her younger sister’s killer to justice. We have two points of view in this book, Sadie and West McCray. West McCray decides to start his own podcast about Sadie after over hearing about her situation from people that were just talking about it. He becomes obsessed with knowing what happens to her and what happened to Mattie. He contacts their family and begins his story from there. He retraces her steps to figure out what exactly happened.

As previously said, it is told in a podcast narrative, and because of that it make the story very unique. We as consumers and readers are drawn to the distinctive ways of storytelling. For example, illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. When they wrote that book, they wanted it to be a different experience when reading it, in comparison to other books. And as such Courtney Summers has done a great job in fulfilling this idea and portrays the narrative in such a way even if it tells the story of a murder.

Overall the story has such great writing even if the characters were not as fully fleshed out, as I wanted them to be.

4 out of 5 stars.