Sadie Starr’s Guide to Starting Over by Miranda Luby

Title: Sadie Starr’s Guide to Starting Over

Author: Miranda Luby

Genre: Fiction

Publisher: Text Publishing

Published: 2^nd August 2022

Format: Paperback

Pages: 288

Price: $22.99

Synopsis: Sadie Starr is obsessed with starting over. A new year, a new diet, a new social media identity. Anything that gives her a chance to be a better version of herself.

So when her dad’s job moves the family interstate, Sadie’s excited for a fresh start. It’s also the perfect excuse to leave behind the mess she’s made with her best friend and secret crush, Daniel, whose advances she rejected – for fear of screwing things up.

But at her new school, life gets complicated fast.

She meets glamorous Alexa and her pink-badged girl gang, on a mission to ‘support women’, and outcast Jack, who the girls say has been stalking fellow student Loz.

But Loz has a different story, one that changes everything.

Sadie’s torn. She wants to be popular. She wants to keep Loz’s secret. She wants to fix everything. But she’ll have to make choices. And the wrong ones could throw her perfect new life into complete chaos.

Sadie Starr’s Guide to Starting Over is an engaging, funny – serious look at the downsides of aiming too high, the dangers of black and white thinking —and the journey to realising imperfections are part of being human.

Trigger warning: disordered eating

~*~

Starting over is hard for anyone, but Sadie is determined to make it work when she moves from Sydney to Melbourne. After a series of disasters have left her feeling like she has no friends, and she’s deleted all her social media and changed her look – a new blank slate for a new year and a new start. And a fresh start means she can change herself and ignore the mess she is leaving behind, and hopefully change everything she doesn’t like about herself. But when she starts at her new school, Morebrae, she finds herself sucked back into things that get wildly complicated from the first day, where popular girl Alexa claims to ‘save’ Sadie from Loz and Jack, two students whose lives are more than what they seem. Pulled into Alexa’s pink badge gang that claims to support women, Sadie is torn when she finds out the truth from Loz. And she is faced with choices that send her into her tumultuous binge eating disorder, while her parents fight and the world of black and white thinking – of an us versus them mentality starts to rear its ugly head in and out of school. Sadie is faced with choices – will she make the right ones?

Sadie Starr’s Guide to Starting Over is a young adult book, aimed at readers aged fourteen and older, and I think it would be wise to stick to this age guide. Sensitive readers may have trouble with the disordered eating, bullying, and other tense themes, whilst it will open up discussion for older readers and I think is a good book to read for adults as well, because it will help parents and teachers – I hope – be able to have discussions with teens that some people might feel are too hard to have, and hopefully it will help teenagers who feel isolated and alone or conflicted like Sadie be able to have the same or similar discussions with friends or trusted adults. It is the kind of book that has heart and soul, and where every reader can see something of themselves in the characters and the diversity of the school and community that Sadie inhabits. As a reader, I could understand why Sadie held back – she didn’t know who to trust, even though she had people who cared about her, and it also felt like – to me – that she didn’t always know how to put her feelings into words – I know how hard that can be.

The way Miranda used social movements and symbolic support and iconography like badges and ribbons to show the difference between saying you stand for something and actually acting on those beliefs, as well as the division that this can cause was well done. I think it is an important thing to write about and talk about – because it showed that a badge is just a symbol, and it is the action behind the words or symbol that makes a difference. There may be causes that we can support by helping with fundraising so the people on the front line can act, but in Sadie’s story, I think the key thing is that these girls could do something, but they were symbolically supporting it instead, which becomes a key theme in Sadie’s story and how she understands Morebrae and how Alexa’s world works. It is this symbolism in the book that sparks a key conflict – and I was so happy that Sadie spoke out and was able to start to find herself, even though she struggled. I think it was a realistic exploration of how something like this might happen.

At its heart, it is a story about finding yourself, about finding out you don’t have to be perfect – that people will like you just the way you are, and about finding your heart and those friends that will stand by you no matter what. I loved the message that this book ultimately sent – to not believe what you are told on fae value, that there is always more to the story, and we should look out for our friends because there is always something going on that they might not want to or be able to talk about. This is a book that I think will help lots of people in so many ways, and I think Sadie illustrated the conflicts that we have with ourselves throughout our lives really well. It is a really good book, and I hope people enjoy reading it.