Not Like Other Girls

     "This is a book about a friend breakup between two teenage girls and how navigating that loss is so distinctly devastating. This is a book about first love. It's a book about being seventeen and restless in your hometown. It's a book about privilege and power and entitlement. 

     It's a book about sexual assault."

     Often when girls and women have been raped they don't realize it. We've been told that rapists are sketchy strangers, not people who we know and trust. We've been told if we didn't wear this, go there, do that nothing could happen. So if something does it's on us. But unrecognized sexual assault can really traumatize victims as we'll see in Meredith Adamo's Not Like Other Girls. 

     Starting her senior year, Jo, Adamo's narrator,  is being shunned by most of her peers. It's because of the six nude photos of her someone sent around. At school she's way behind in her work and on some kind of academic probation. She has only one goal--getting the fuck out of high school.

     She's stunned when her former best friend and now nemesis, Maddie, covertly approaches her in tears asking her for help. She thinks she's in trouble. They agree to meet up later...

    ...only Maddie is a no show and not just for their appointment. She is gone. The media is camped out on the high school lawn. Everyone is speculating that she's been kidnapped, maybe killed. Or probably she's run away after being rejected by her dream college--the only one she applied to.

     None of this rings true to Jo. She's decided she's going to find Maddie not realizing what dirt she's going to discover or how dangerous her quest is going to be...

     ...or that she'll have to remember a horrible thing Maddie's older brother did to her when she was only fifteen. 

     Not Like Other Girls is a truly twisty mystery and so much more. I highly recommend it not only for the YA crowd, but for college undergrads. 

     Adamo herself was sexually assaulted without realizing it. She hopes that Jo's story will help sexual violence survivors feel less alone. 

On a purrrsonal note, Tuesday and Wednesday we had the UMaine Red Cross blood drive. I ran the canteen as usual. It went really well. We had 99 successful donations including 17 first time donors. 

A great big shout out goes out to all participants. 

     

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