Module 3: Book Review: Verse Novel

Stop Pretending: What Happened When

My Big Sister Went Crazy

by Sonya Sones

Plot Summary: This novel in verse by Sonya Sones is an autobiographical memoir. It tells the story of what happened when the author was thirteen years old and her nineteen year old sister had a nervous breakdown and was later hospitalized. Feeling quite alone, the author writes about her loneliness, her family torn apart by grief, and the heartbreak of losing her sister to mental illness.

Critical Analysis: This novel, told in first person, is a compilation of poems which are no less than five lines and no more than three pages long. The authors use of free-verse poems in this award winning novel, allows the reader to share in the heroine’s thoughts and feelings. Reading the journal entries, a bond is created between the reader and "Cookie" (aka Sonya Sones). Cookie’s losses feel real and painful. The small glimmers of hope become joyful celebrations to the reader. Sones' choice of book title, Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy immediately caught my interest as I have a teen-age niece who was recently diagnosed as bi-polar. This novel could have easily been written by her younger sister and one that I wish I could tactfully recommend that she read. Sones' novel is by no means a lighthearted book of prose poetry but a memoir of a young lady who faces a life changing experience while mourning the loss of her sister, as she once was, to manic depression.

Excerpt:

In The Morning

there's

this golden moment

when the sun

licks through the gauze

fluttering at my window

warming my eyelids to opening


this golden moment

when I'm not yet awake enough

to remember

that there are things

I would rather

forget

Extension: Read this novel in a middle/high school literature class. Discuss what Cookie might be feeling if she was a student at your school. Locate other novels that depict mental illnesses such as The Bell Jar, or Girl Interrupted and/or films such as Sybil, or One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest in order to gain a deeper understanding of what it feels like to lose someone to mental illness. This may help students be more understanding towards the lives touched by mental illness and perhaps enable them to be more sympathetic to others who are "different".

Sones, Sonya. 1999. Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

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