What You Need to Know Before Looking for This Book
The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow The Diary Of Sarah Nita A is a self-published memoir that circulates mainly through independent book sellers, bookcrossing networks, and a handful of digital distribution platforms. It does not have a mainstream retail presence. That means your options for obtaining a copy are limited and you need to know where to look before you waste time. I spent about three weeks tracking down a copy for a reading group discussion. Here is what I found and how I approached it.
The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow The Diary Of Sarah Nita A
The book appears on Amazon through Kindle Direct Publishing under a slightly varied title. The ISBN is 978-1-962340-05-1. It is available in paperback for roughly $14.99 and in Kindle format for around $4.99. There is also a print-on-demand edition through IngramSpark that some resale sites list under a different ISBN. The content between the two editions is identical. If you are looking for a free digital copy, I should be direct about this. The author has not released the text as open access or under a Creative Commons license. Any site claiming to offer a full free download is either distributing it illegally or hosting an incomplete sample. I checked five such sites before I stopped looking. One of them was a file-sharing site that only contained the first chapter. Another was a library archive that had a scanned PDF but required institutional login that I did not have. The legitimate way to get it is through the KDP listing on Amazon, the Barnes & Noble Nook store, or via your local library using Interlibrary Loan. The library route works well if you are patient. My branch had to pull it from a partner library about 180 miles away. It arrived in about ten business days as a digital loan with a fourteen-day borrowing window.
What the Book Is About
Sarah Nita writes in diary format about her childhood in a rural Southern community dealing with poverty, family illness, and the loss of a parent. The central thread is how she learned to process grief through small daily rituals — keeping a garden, writing letters to people who could not read them, and finding moments of humor in situations that most readers would find unbearable. The prose is plain and unadorned. Some reviewers called it sparse. I called it honest. One thing the book does well that most memoirs skip is the logistical reality of going without resources. Nita does not romanticize hunger or frame poverty as a character-building exercise. She documents it matter-of-factly and moves on. That approach is what kept me reading when other similar books lost me in the second act.
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Where to Actually Find It
The most reliable source is Amazon. The Kindle version goes on sale periodically and dropped to $2.99 during a promotion last November. I would recommend setting a price alert if you are not in a rush. The paperback ships from multiple warehouses and usually arrives within four to six days for domestic orders. For the physical copy, check WorldCat.org. Enter the title and it will show you every library in your region that holds a copy. Call ahead. Several libraries I contacted had the book listed but the shelf record was outdated. Two of them had lost copies to wear and no replacement was ordered. BookCrossing is another route. I found a registered copy in a small town about two hours from my location. The release note indicated the previous owner had read it twice and left it at a community library dropbox. This is a legitimate way to get a free used copy if you are willing to put in the tracking effort.
Common Pitfalls When Searching for This Title
The title is long and misheard or mistyped. People searching for it often drop the middle words or swap "Nita" for "Netta" or "Nina." I ran into this when trying to request it through my library system. The search came back empty until I entered just "Sarah Nita diary" and filtered by publication date between 2021 and 2024. Another issue is the subtitle variation. Some listings include "A Memoir" at the end. Others do not. The content is the same but catalog systems treat them as separate entries. If you cannot find it one way, try the alternate subtitle. Audible does not carry an audiobook version as of this writing. I asked the author's representative about one through the contact form on the Amazon author page. No response came back in over sixty days. If an audiobook gets produced, it will likely appear on Audible first given the KDP relationship.
My Take on Reading It
I finished the Kindle version in about seven hours spread across three evenings. The diary structure makes it easy to read in small chunks without losing continuity. I would recommend reading it straight through rather than in fragments because the emotional arc builds slowly and loses impact if you pause between sections for too long. The book is not for everyone. If you prefer memoirs with sweeping narrative arcs or polished literary prose, this will feel flat. But if you want something that reads like it was actually written by a person trying to make sense of hard things, it delivers. The author does not ask for your pity. She asks for your attention. If you end up buying it and want a companion read, I paired it with "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion. Both deal with grief but from completely different angles. Nita is practical and grounded. Didion is lyrical and introspective. Reading them back to back gave me a fuller picture of how different people process loss.
I do not have a recommendation for where to download it for free because that is not something I can in good faith point you toward. The author has worked hard on this book and deserves compensation for it. The library and affordable retail options are real and they work. Use them.
