What My Mother Doesn't Know » (Reprint)

SONYA SONES has written four novels-in-verse: Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy, What My Mother Doesn't Know, One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies, and its companion, What My Girlfriend Doesn’t Know. Her books have been honored with a Christopher Award, the Myra Cohn Livingston Poetry Award, and the Claudia Lewis Award for Poetry. But the coolest honor she ever got was when What My Mother Doesn't Know made it onto the ALA’s list of Top Ten Most Challenged Books, twice. She lives near the beach in California. You can find out way more than you ever wanted to know about her at www.sonyasones.com.

My name is Sophie.

This book is about me.

It tells

the heart-stoppingly riveting story

of my first love.

And also of my second.

And, okay, my third love too.

It's not that I'm boy crazy.

It's just that even though

I'm almost fifteen

it's like

my mind

and my body

and my heart

just don't seem to be able to agree

on anything.

Publishers Weekly

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 clich?d, "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. Ages 12-up. (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.