6 Novels to Read While Waiting for Courtney Summers’ Sadie to Hit Shelves

Who among us hasn’t finished a Courtney Summers book and immediately wanted another? With her unflinching prose, sharp-edged characters, and poignant themes, each novel she writes has a unique power to destroy your emotions. Summers’ next book, Sadie, is slated for release this fall, and centers on a girl who goes missing after the murder of her sister, Mattie. It’s told in two threads: in one, Sadie is on a desperate mission to find her sister’s killer, even if she has almost no information to go on. In the other, set a year after Sadie’s disappearance, a radio journalist named West McCray starts a Serial-esque podcast dedicated to tracking Sadie down. Alternating between the two stories, Sadie is simply unputdownable. While we wait for it to hit stores in September, here are six more books with similar threads of mystery, darkness, and family dynamics you’ll want to discover first.

The Astonishing Color of After, by Emily X.R. Pan
How do we move on after tragedy? How do we pick ourselves up when the world crumbles around us? These questions are both explored in Sadie and in Emily X.R. Pan’s knockout debut novel, The Astonishing Color of After. After Leigh Chen Sanders’s mother commits suicide, Leigh, half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to finally meet her maternal grandparents. She believes that there she can find the bird her mother transformed into when she died. What Leigh doesn’t expect to find are family secrets, truths about herself and her mother, and a new relationship with her grandparents. The Astonishing Color of After is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking.

The Disturbed Girl’s Dictionary, by NoNieqa Ramos
In any given Summers novel, you’ll often find a girl on the edge. She’s probably angry, whether at herself, society, or both. NoNieqa Ramos offers a fresh angry girl protagonist in The Disturbed Girl’s Dictionary. To her school, Macy is “disturbed.” They say she acts out in class, is too loud, and is too disruptive. But Macy has enough on her plate without worrying what her teachers think of her. Her dad is in prison, and she can’t tell him that her mom, who doesn’t do much anymore, is cheating on him. Her best friend might not be speaking to her, but Macy won’t walk away when she knows danger is near. And to top it off, her bother has been taken by Child Protective Services. Told in the format of a dictionary, NoNieqa Ramos has a captivating writing style that will leave you eager for her sophomore novel, The Book of Love, out in 2019.

Hidden Pieces, by Paula Stokes
After accidentally setting a fire in an abandoned hotel and almost killing someone by default inside, Embry Woods wouldn’t exactly call herself a good person. But she wouldn’t say she’s bad either, and as difficult as telling the truth and choosing the right path is, she’s learning. Her biggest challenge comes when someone starts blackmailing her…someone who knows the truth about what happened at the hotel. Someone out for blood. Aided by her kinda-sorta-boyfriend, Holden, Embry must decide how much of herself and her actions she will show the world and how much she will hide, even if it means someone else gets hurt.

A Girl Like That, by Tanaz Bhathena
If you loved Summers’s Some Girls Are and look forward to the podcast portion of Sadie where people describe and speculate what kind of person Sadie is, Tanaz Bhathena’s hard-hitting A Girl Like That is a must read. Rumors fly about Zarin Wadia, from her romances to her mischief-making. Parents caution their kids away from her and whisper about her behind closed doors. But the rumors never stopped Porus Dumasia from only wanting to be with Zarin. When the two die in a car crash together in Saudi Arabia, people, including the police, suddenly start to question what they knew about Zarin…and everything they didn’t know.

You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone, by Rachel Lynn Solomon
A central theme of Sadie is the relationship between sisters, Adina and Tovah. You’ll find the same complex but ultimately loving bond in Rachel Lynn Solomon’s contemporary debut, You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone. When they turn 18, Adina and Tovah take a genetic test for Huntington’s, a degenerative genetic disease their mother has. While they await the results, Tovah finds solace in her Jewish religion, trying to stay focused on her goal to get into John Hopkins. Adina, a musical prodigy, finds herself drawn to her music teacher almost as much as she is drawn to her viola. The results? One twin test positive. One negative. Torn in opposite directions, Adina and Tovah must come apart before they can find their way back to their sisterhood.

The Cheerleaders, by Kara Thomas
Another book we’re waiting on right now? The third release from thriller writer Thomas, out July 31. Her latest book, and quite possibly her best yet, follows Monica, the sister of one of five cheerleaders to die within months of each other. Five years have passed since their deaths, the cheerleading squad has long since been disbanded, and Monica is still trying to reconcile herself with her sister’s suicide. And when she finds mysterious letters in her stepfather’s desk and an odd final call in her sister’s old cell phone, something about it just doesn’t feel right. Now she’s questioning not just her sister’s death, but those of all five cheerleaders.