Not Like Other Girls by Meredith Adamo

Title: Not Like Other Girls

Author: Meredith Adamo

Genre: Mystery

Publisher: Bloomsbury Australia

Published: 30^th April 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 320

Price: $19.99

Synopsis: Cheats. Liars. Fakes. Friends? A breathtaking contemporary YA thriller – serious questions and hot romance in an irresistible twisty mystery. Perfect for fans of One of Us is Lying, We Were Liars and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.

Jo used to be the perfect high-school girl – class president, popular, bright and successful. But when nude photos of her were leaked to the entire school, her grades plummeted, her friends fell away and now she’s a reckless, difficult social outcast. The girl who ‘deserved’ it.

Then her former best friend Maddie disappears. Everyone else assumes Maddie has just run away but that doesn’t add up to Jo. To discover the truth, Jo needs to get back in with the group of classmates who have shut her out: the boys who betrayed her and the clique of girls who whisper behind her back. And she has to make it look as if she wants to be there.

The only way back in is through Hudson. An old fling with his own reasons for finding Maddie, he persuades Jo to fake date him. And it works. But as the truth about Maddie’s disappearance comes to light, so do long-hidden secrets from Jo’s past. Who is Jo really trying to find-Maddie, or the girl she herself used to be?

Content warning: this book mentions sexual assault.

*This book was sent to me for review by Sisters in Crime*

~*~

Jo-Lynn Kirby is seventeen and in her last year of high school at a prestigious Rochester school in New York. Here, she used to be the perfect girl. She was popular, bright, successful – and she was class president. But all that changed at a pool party. She was blamed for something she never did, and somebody leaked nude photos of her to the school – and that’s when everything fell apart. Everything starts to go wrong for Jo-Lynn, she has no friends, her family doesn’t believe in her and she becomes ‘one of those girls’ that everyone gossips about. The girl who has done everything wrong, who has thrown everything away. That girl, who has no future. But for Jo-Lynn, things are changing. Even though she’s on academic probation, a former student of her high school wants to work with her for the Senior Experience. Tess Spradlin is a journalist who chooses Jo-Lynn over perfect, already-into New York University student, Maddie Price, Jo-Lynn’s former friend.

Then Maddie comes to Jo-Lynn – desperate to share something with her. Within hours, Maddie has disappeared, and nobody knows where she is, and something weird is going on. Nothing Jo-Lynn knows about Maddie adds up, and everything she is hearing doesn’t fit – and she fears the worst has happened. Jo-Lynn knows that if she’s going to find out where Maddie is, she needs to get in with the Birds, the girls who shut her out after the nude photo link, and the boys who betrayed her – and to do this, she starts fake-dating Hudson who has his own reasons to find Maddie – yet everyone is too busy keeping secrets and using old knowledge and new knowledge against each other to make sure the truth is told.

Slowly, what happened to Maddie comes to light, but it’s not quite what everyone expects – and the implications of what happened could be far-reaching – more than anyone ever thought it could be. And Jo is also on a journey of self-discovery and unravelling what really happened to her two years ago – when nobody would listen, when everyone cast her aside and refused to hear her story. Nobody has ever cared about her story, but everyone cares about Maddie’s. And so the mystery kicks off – what happened to Maddie, what happened to Jo, and what seediness is bubbling within the halls of Culver Honours High School that has led to the rumours about Maddie’s disappearance? It kicks of a thriller with twists and turns, where everything is not quite as it seems. Jo-Lynn’s determination is palpable – you can see that she wants to find out what happened, and slowly, the pieces of the puzzle come together. But not before things get more dangerous as the novel goes on – and Jo-Lynn starts to uncover not only more secrets about Maddie and the kids at school – even those she thought she knew well like Miles, and what they all really think about her, her family, and brother, but she starts connecting how she is feeling and why things have gone downhill with the events of two years ago at the pool party – and what it means when people refer to her as a girl like that.

As the narrator, much of what we see is through Jo-Lynn’s eyes and experiences, so we come to understand what has happened through her, and she comes across as someone who is troubled yet also as someone who knows what she is doing, and whom has never had anyone listen to her, so she hasn’t been able to tell her story, hasn’t been able to let people know what really happened – they all believed what they wanted to believe in a world where popularity and power were traded and taken away whenever people thought someone had done something wrong. This book examines the pressures of getting into a good university, power dynamics and imbalances, and the way the press becomes entangled in secrets and mysteries, whilst peeling back the curtain on why people keep secrets and seemingly don’t do anything to help find out what is really going on. It is also a story that reflects on how we respond to things, and the lengths that people will go to so they can keep their secrets – something that bubbles along throughout the book, because I was never sure who I could trust – even the people who seemed trustworthy felt as though they were hiding something, and like Jo-Lynn, I could sense that there was a lot more going on with everyone than the early chapters hint at.

The idea that someone can also use something that you didn’t take or create for public consumption against you is also a theme, where Jo-Lynn is grappling with what happened at the pool party, the nude pictures and subsequent events that she has stopped talking about, stopped thinking about and shelved away because nobody wanted to hear about it. I think including this highlighted the impact that this had on Jo-Lynn and her drive to find Maddie and find out why Maddie wanted to talk to her because it showed that everyone’s story is important, and whilst some stories might be seen as more important, people like Jo-Lynn whose stories are ignored should still be told. And it was what happened to Maddie that drove the novel, lining up all the clues and evidence over the period of the novel, where things became clearer, and realisations hit Jo-Lynn when they needed to, ensuring that the mystery was tightly told and created, that everything had a reason for happening when it did.

With so much going on in this book, the mystery was the key thing that drove the story, as it helped Jo-Lynn realise what had really happened to her. It was a novel that showed that even without social media and a whole lot of other resources, teens solving a crime can be done without too much high-tech reliance, and this is what made it work so well, feel contemporary and modern, but also showed that sometimes going low-tech is the best way to solve a mystery.