Alumna’s First Novel Nominated for Award
While working as an intern at a public library with a reputation for being haunted, a book-loving college student thinks about becoming a librarian. So, while a global pandemic turns life upside-down, she enrolls in graduate school. She works hard and pitches her first young adult novel to literary agents while earning her second master’s degree. Her first novel is published, widely celebrated, becomes a Target Young Adult (YA) Book Club pick, and is nominated for a major award.
Sounds like fiction? Nope. That’s Meredith Adamo’s story. And she’s just getting started.
Adamo (MSLS ’22) grew up in Rochester, New York (which she describes as her favorite place on the planet) and attended Syracuse University. While pursuing a master’s in creative writing, she gained experience working with faculty on research proposals. That experience spurred an interest in the research administration world, so she traded the frigid cold of western New York for the heat and humidity of the south for a position as a grant writer at North Carolina State University. She couldn’t stop thinking about becoming a librarian, so two years after moving to N.C. she applied to the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS).
Adamo says that her first semester in Fall 2020 was challenging.
“It was unlike anything I had ever done. I’d never even taken an online class. It just was so new to me, and I was also five years out of undergrad by that point, so I was not used to being a student anymore or having homework. No one really knew how to go about it [the change to an online experience], and we were all just trying our best. I ended up forming a bond with a lot of the people in my program because of it, because we were all just stumbling through this together.”
Adamo describes her first semester as a blur, but by the time she entered her second semester she was able to take more specialized classes that made an impact. She focused on children’s literature.
“I took pretty much all the classes related to school librarianship, pedagogy, and children’s books. The one, weirdly enough, the one that I didn’t get to take was the YA literature class.”
Adamo had been particularly interested in the YA course because she was about six years into writing her first YA novel. During her second year in graduate school, she began to seriously think about having her work published.
“I was trying to get an agent all my last year of my program. So, it was very stressful balancing both this creative book piece and then also my master’s project and all these different pieces.”
“I think that UNC changed how I think about my writing. The librarian’s brain impacted how I think like an author, which I didn’t anticipate going into the program. I think it made me a lot more cognizant of the reader, because the reader—the child at the library—is such a real figure when we talk in the classrooms. We’re talking about our community. I think sometimes when you write, you can be in this headspace of not really imagining it out in the world or just being so hung up on the adults who read it at the publishing company. So being more focused on that person on the other side of the book, I think, was a really big shift for me.”
Adamo’s book, Not Like Other Girls, deals with complex, contemporary young adult issues including a leak of nude photos, a missing former friend who’s assumed to have run away, and betrayal.
“I think the more that I started to develop those contemporary themes, I was thinking about those readers who need a lifeline and can’t necessarily get it from the people in their lives, or who need to see their experiences reflected on the page in some way. My master’s project had to do with counter-narratives. That was something that we talked about in one of Sandra’s (Hughes-Hassel) children’s literature classes, and it really resonated with me. So, I wanted to show how important it is for readers to see themselves and to become empowered to tell their stories.”
Adamo calls herself a “non-practicing librarian,” and is proud that the librarians she has met while talking about her book have embraced her into the library community.
“The support from libraries has been beyond anything I ever could have dreamed of. They have championed this book and me every step of the way, which is so wonderful.”
Through the Young Adult Library Services Association of the American Library Association, librarians nominated Not Like Other Girls to become a 2025 William C. Morris Debut Award Finalist. (The award recipient will be announced on January 27, 2025.) The book has also been named a Chicago Public Library Best of the Best, a BookPage Best Young Adult Book of 2024, a Southern Book Prize Young Readers Finalist, a May/June Kids’ Indie Next List pick, and it was the May 2024 Target YA Book Club pick.
Adamo is already at work on her second novel, which she describes as being about “this kind of messy, flawed, unlikeable girl who is investigating another disappearance. This time it’s her mom, and she’s uncovering how the mom she has is not really who she thought she was.” She also has dreams of writing a book for middle-grade readers and a romantic comedy for adults.
“One of the most affirming parts is having readers reach out to me and say, ‘This felt like my life. Thank you.’ Which always makes me wish that wasn’t something they had to go through but makes me feel glad that [my book] is a tool for them.”
Learn more about Meredith Adamo at meredithadamo.com.
Update: In January, Not Like Other Girls received the American Library Association’s 2025 William C. Morris Award
Related Programs: Master of Science in Library Science (MSLS)