Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy - Hardcover

Sones, Sonya

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060283874 ISBN 13: 9780060283872

Publisher: HarperTeen, 1999

Synopsis

When her older sister unexpectedly has a mental breakdown, a young girl deals with the consequences of a suddenly very different life, one without her best friend.

About this title

About the Author

As a teenager Sonya Sones spent hours pouring her private thoughts and feelings into journals.Her passion for writing, drawing, and photography led her to begin making animated films when she was seventeen.She studied filmmaking in college, and went on to teach animation, make films for public television, and edit movies in Hollywood.She lives with her husband and two children near the beach in California.Stop Pretending is her first book.

Reviews

Grade 6-9-An unpretentious, accessible book that could provide entry points for a discussion about mental illness-its stigma, its realities, and its affect on family members. Based on the journals Sones wrote at the age of 13 when her 19-year-old sister was hospitalized due to manic depression, the simply crafted but deeply felt poems reflect her thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams during that troubling time. In one poem, the narrator fears that "If I stay/any longer/than an hour,/ I'll see that my eyes/have turned into her eyes,/my lips/have turned into her lips, ." She dreads having her friends learn of her sister's illness. "If I told them that my sister's nuts,/they might act sympathetic,/but behind my back/would everyone laugh?" and wonders what she could have done to prevent the breakdown. All of the emotions and feelings are here, the tightness in the teen's chest when thinking about her sibling in the hospital, her grocery list of adjectives for mental illness, and the honest truth in the collection's smallest poem, "I don't want to see you./I dread it./There./I've said it." An insightful author's note and brief list of organizations are included.
Sharon Korbeck, Waupaca Area Public Library, WI
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

PLB 0-06-028386-6 In a story based on real events, and told in poems, Sones explores what happened and how she reacted when her adored older sister suddenly began screaming and hearing voices in her head, and was ultimately hospitalized. Individually, the poems appear simple and unremarkable, snapshot portraits of two sisters, a family, unfaithful friends, and a sweet first love. Collected, they take on life and movement, the individual frames of a movie that in the unspooling become animated, telling a compelling tale and presenting a painful passage through young adolescence. The form, a story-in-poems, fits the story remarkably well, spotlighting the musings of the 13-year-old narrator, and pinpointing the emotions powerfully. She copes with friends who snub her, worries that she, too, will go mad, and watches her sister's slow recovery. To a budding genre that includes Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust (1997) and Virginia Euwer Wolff's Make Lemonade (1993), this book is a welcome addition. (Poetry. 10-14) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperTeen
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060283874
• ISBN 13: 9780060283872
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160