What my mother doesn't know

Written by Sonya Sones

Bibliographic data

Sones, Sonya. 2001. What my mother doesn’t know. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. ISBN 0689841140

Plot Summary

This is a story of teenage female and the events that happen in her ninth grade year. This book is written in a series of free verse poems.

Critical Analysis

What my mother doesn’t know is a verse novel that is a very easy read. The longest verse is three pages in length. This would be a great novel for reluctant female readers. It is a chronicle of a teenage girl, Sophie and her boy crazy life. Sophie talks about her everyday girl issues, her parents troubled marriage, her personal boy problems, her mom’s depression, and her friends Rachel and Grace.

Sones creates text that is fluid and easy to comprehend. As a reader follows Sophie’s life, they can feel her emotions of happiness, sadness, excitement, and intimacy. You may even remember feeling the same way in high school.

There are no illustrations or pictures until page 231. This is when a picture of a couple in an embrace, appear at the bottom right corner of each page on the right. If you flip the pages you will notice a flip book design, to show the movement in the characters. The couple comes together for a kiss and separates as you flip through the pages. This is symbolic because it is when Sophie finally accepts her feelings for Murphy, and is willing to celebrate the news with her friends. I thought this was a very clever addition to the novel.

This novel’s main audience is the teenage female reader. I think this would be a good book to encourage preteen female readers to experience this form of poetry.

Review Excerpts

• “..the author poignantly captures the tingle and heartache of being young and boy-crazy.” Publishers Weekly starred review
• “Sones' book makes these often-difficult years a little more livable by making them real, normal, and OK.” School Library Journal

Connections

• Have students read other novels by Sonya Sones like, Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy, One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies.