Book cover image from Amazon.com
STOP PRETENDING: WHAT HAPPENED WHEN MY BIG SISTER WENT CRAZY
1. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sones, Sonya. 1999. STOP PRETENDING: WHAT HAPPENED WHEN MY BIG SISTER WENT CRAZY. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. ISBN 9780060283872.
2. PLOT SUMMARY
Sonya Sones takes a look at mental illness through the eyes of the people left behind. During Christmas Break, Cookie's big sister has a breakdown and is put in a "psycho" ward. Cookie writes in her journal to deal with all the confusion going on in her mind. "When I was lost/you were the one who found me/now you're the one who's lost/and I can't find you anywhere."
As the family comes to terms with Sister's illness, Cookie goes through fear of being crazy too, loss of friends, depression, and first love. At one point, after missing her sister's help on homework, she writes,"I'm sitting here taking the test/but the numbers on the page/keep scrambling in my head/and the only equation/ I really understand is: 4-1=0." By the end of the novel, Cookie and her family have adjusted to their new version of "normal".
3. CRITICAL ANALYSIS
This book, written as a diary in verse, is most powerful when one reads the author's notes. STOP PRETENDING is based on Sones own experience as her sister has a mental breakdown. After sharing a poem about visiting her sister in the hospital, Sones was encouraged to share even more of her poems because "Poems like this would be helpful to anyone who has a family member with a problem that's throwing the rest of the family off-kilter".
The first person narrative of this book is written so that anyone experiencing this type of situation could relate. Her sister is called "Sister", while Sonya is called "Cookie". This quote from the review in Children's Books in Ireland explains the book best, "It is undoubtedly engaging, in places poignant, and skillful in sketching in the background details of home, family relationships and hospital. But its overall tone is uncertain".
4. HONORS AND AWARDS
California Department of Education's 2002 Recommended Literature List: Kindergarten through Grade Twelve
5. REVIEW EXCERPTS
From School Library Journal: "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."
From Amazon.com Review: "In a sequence of short, intense poems based on the author's own experiences, a 13-year-old girl suffers through her shifting feelings about her sibling's mental illness."
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