Module 14: Poetry and Story Collections

I have to rave about one of the books I read for this module and the author. What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones is so excellent! I had never read a book written in verse before (not counting The Canturbury Tales), and I think Sones does an excellent job of not only developing her characters but also creating a world for her book that writing in a normal style would ruin the mood.

Now, to actually tell what the book is about.... Sophie is a normal teenage girl. Her thoughts and feelings, even the embarrassing ones, are told with heartfelt honesty as she chronicles her experiences with her first love, the rebound she thinks she loves, and the boy she's really meant to be with. I don't want to give anything away, but I have to say that if I were a teenager, I think I'd want to be Sophie's best friend.

"Drawing on the recognizable cadences of teenage speech, Sones (Stop Pretending) poignantly captures the tingle and heartache of being young and boy-crazy. The author keenly portrays ninth-grader Sophie's trajectory of lusty crushes and disillusionment whether she is gazing at Dylan's "smoldery dark eyes" or dancing with a mystery man to music that "is slow/ and/ saxophony." Best friends Rachel and Grace provide anchoring friendships for Sophie as she navigates her home life as an only child with a distant father and a soap opera-devotee mother whose "shrieking whips around inside me/ like a tornado." Some images of adolescent changes carry a more contemporary cachet, "I got my period I prefer/ to think of it as/ rebooting my ovarian operating system," others are consciously cliched, "my molehills/ have turned into mountains/ overnight" this just makes Sophie seem that much more familiar. With its separate free verse poems woven into a fluid and coherent narrative with a satisfying ending, Sophie's honest and earthy story feels destined to captivate a young female audience, avid and reluctant readers alike." -- Publishers Weekly

"In a fast, funny, touching book, Sones uses the same simple, first-person poetic narrative she used in Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy (1999), but this story isn't about family anguish; it's about the joy and surprise of falling in love. Sophie, 14, thinks she has a crush on handsome Dylan, but she discovers that her most passionate feelings are for someone totally unexpected, a boy who makes her laugh and shows her how to look at the world. And when they kiss, every cell in her body is on fire. Meanwhile, she fights with her mom--who fights with Sophie's dad--and she refuses to wear a pink flowered dress to the school dance, secretly changing into a slinky black outfit with the help of her girlfriends. Their girl talk is hilarious and irreverent in the style of Naylor's Alice books. The poetry is never pretentious or difficult; on the contrary, the very short, sometimes rhythmic lines make each page fly. Sophie's voice is colloquial and intimate, and the discoveries she makes are beyond formula, even while they are as sweetly romantic as popular song. A natural for reluctant readers, this will also attract young people who love to read." -- Booklist

I would definitely recommend this to girls who are reluctant readers because the free verse style makes the book much less overwhelming. I would also use this book as a selection in a girls-only book club, or even a mother-daughter book club.