BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sones, Sonya. 2001. What My Mother Doesn’t Know. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. ISBN 0689841140
PLOT SUMMARY
In this verse novel, which reads much like a diary, Jewish American teenager, Sophie, graduates from the eighth grade and enters high school, a world full of new romantic relationships, while cherishing old friendships and evaluating her relationship with her parents. Sofia catalogues the short period of her life the novel spans with events that are monumental to her personal and emotional development.
CRITICAL ANALYSIS
This work is written in the verse form and does not rely on rhyme but its rhythms are in the familiar cadence of the speech of a modern adolescent girl. Each individual poem details a moment or event in Sophie’s life, so they vary in length. Natural dialogue is interposed between the prose. The phrasing of and breaks in sentences signify breaks in thought or stream of consciousness. The readers are truly allowed to feel that we are inside Sophie’s head. After all, we do not always think in complete sentences, and sometimes our thoughts do not always make sense or are non sequitur.
Sones provides imagery by using words such as “smoldery”, “zapped”, and “buzzing” in poems about Sophie’s boyfriend Dylan when the relationship is going well to portray and amplify the electricity in Sophie and Dylan’s attraction to each other. Everything seems shocking and fresh. Sones describes different parts of the anatomy such as eyes, lips, and arms, bringing sexual imagery into play. Readers can feel the distracted heat and friction through the words and choppy phrasing in poems where Sophie and Dylan are touching. Readers also feel Sophie’s distant attraction to the boy in art class, Murphy, as she fantasizes about what it would be like to kiss him when his lips are described. Sophie studies Murphy in an attempt to evoke sympathy, but begins to focus on the sexual aspects of how she would cheer up this sad social pariah. She dissembles his face, focusing on individual features such as his arms that are “aching to hold on to someone.” Instead of waning to give him a friendly hug, she wishes to kiss him. These clever lapses of attention from Dylan to Murphy foreshadow a future relationship.
Sones masterfully brings out the emotion in the developing story by the arrangement of the poems. Sophie focuses so much on her outside relationships, making having friends and boyfriends so important that a reader might begin to wonder what is missing inside of her. Sophie’s continued need for acceptance and to be found attractive by Dylan in the prose creates a soft tone of desperation. Then, Sones presents us with poems about Sophie’s parents and the relationship between them that Sophie feels is nonexistent. The phrases are short, but complete. Her mother prefers soap operas to real life, and Sophie feels ignored. Her father is emotionally distant and does not know how to show affection. Sophie is not sure if either of them loves her and she longs for the normalcy she feels her friends have within their families. She needs her relationship with Dylan to make her feel normal. Sophie views her mother and father’s relationship as something that has faded. They were in love once, but now they argue and fight as if they hate each other, and Sophie feels torn and embarrassed. She wants to run away, but she is afraid she will have to come to terms with what is happening in her household when confronted by outsiders. She does not want to be different. Right after a series of poems about her parents, a short almost fragment of a poem with Sophie spending time with Dylan begins, featuring nothing but stolen touches, as if she needs his touch to be reassured that she is worthy of attention.
Some of the poetry is structured into geometric shapes. In one poem, Sophie wishes she is small enough to fit in Dylan’s pocket, so that she can always be with him and feel his warmth. The poem is shaped like a cone which of course diminishes in size, and may give the reader the feeling that sometimes, Sophie wishes she could disappear. There are also poems where Sophie expresses insecurity about her height and wishes she is smaller. A teenage girl’s insecurity about size, especially during that awkward time period where girls are often a bit taller than the boys in their classes is clearly expressed.
Over the course of the novel, the readers feel Sophie’s attractions, pain and light-hearted moments of camaraderie with her girlfriends; we also feel her need for acceptance from her peers, her parents and her community. There are short scenes where certain members of the community do not accept her Jewish culture, and she wonders if she appears outwardly Jewish. She does not like when Dylan insists that she not tell his mom that she is Jewish, and does not like when Dylan’s mother made an offensive comment and Dylan did not rise to her defense. She is looking for a security and stability in relationships, and romance that resembles what her best friends’ seem to have in their relationships.
When she begins to see Murphy, the school pariah, in secret, we the readers can feel a genuine growing attraction in Sophie. Their relationship is a slow burn, which consists of multiple outings and conversations about art and other subjects that interest them both, which is a bold contrast to the mostly physical relationship had between Sophie and Dylan. Readers are made to recall when Sophie noticed Murphy’s arms at the beginning of the novel, when she and Murphy dance together at a Halloween dance. She does not know it is him at the time, because he is masked. The scene is spicy and sensual, with the dancers pressed against each other as their bodies move together as “though they know something [Sophie does not] know”. After the dance, Sophie becomes “obsessed with arms…his forearms.” Later in the story, Murphy hugs her and she remembers the feel of “his forearms”, arms that at the beginning of the story were “aching to hold on to someone”. To fall in love with Murphy would be to step away from the normalcy she holds dear. Her friends would not accept Murphy; her mother took one look at Murphy and assumed Sophie would never date him. However, over the course of the prose, Murphy demonstrates an understanding and open acceptance of Sophie that she has received from no one else. Sophie is faced with a social dilemma and her decision to move forward with Murphy symbolizes Sophie’s new acceptance of herself and what is normal.
REVIEW EXCERPTS(S)
*Starred Review* 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.—Publishers Weekly.
Gr 6-8-A story written in poetry form. Sophie is happily dating Dylan, "until he's practically glued himself to my side." Then she falls for cyberboy ("if I could marry a font/I'd marry his"). Imagine her surprise when he becomes downright scary. In the satisfying ending, Sophie finds the perfect boyfriend-someone she's known all along. Sones is a bright, perceptive writer who digs deeply into her protagonist's soul. There she reveals the telltale signs of being "boy crazy"; the exciting edginess of cyber romances; the familiar, timeless struggle between teens and parents; and the anguish young people feel when their parents fight. But life goes on, and relationships subtly change. Sones's poems are glimpses through a peephole many teens may be peering through for the first time, unaware that others are seeing virtually the same new, scary, unfamiliar things (parents having nuclear meltdowns, meeting a boyfriend's parents, crying for no apparent reason). In What My Mother Doesn't Know, a lot is revealed about the teenage experience-("could I really be falling for that geek I dissed a month ago?"), clashes with close friends, and self-doubts. It could, after all, be readers' lives, their English classes, their hands in a first love's. Of course, mothers probably do know these goings-on in their daughters' lives. It's just much easier to believe they don't. Sones's book makes these often-difficult years a little more livable by making them real, normal, and OK.—SLJ.
*Starred Review* Gr. 6-10. 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. Hazel Rochman—Booklist.
Brilliant. –KLIATT.
CONNECTIONS
For youths looking for a continuation of the lives of Sophie and Murphy and how their relationship progresses, Sones has written a sequel in verse from the vantage point of Murphy. Other novels in verse that portray adolescent girls and their personal and emotional growth and maturation as they face high school ordeals are also listed. These novels will help expose adolescents to poetry that is relevant to them and can better their enjoyment of the form.
Sones, Sonya. 2008. What My Girlfriend Doesn’t Know. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. ISBN 0689876035
Hemphill, Stephanie. 2005. Things Left Unsaid: A Novel in Poems. New York: Hyperion Books CH. ISBN 0786818501
Smith, Kirsten. 2007. The Geography of Girlhood. New York: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. ISBN 0316017350
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