'What My Mother Doesn't Know' by Sonya Sones (LS 5663)

Sones, Sonya. 2001. What My Mother Doesn't Know. NewYork: Simon & Schuster.

ISBN: 978-0-689-84114-9

Cover image from
www.simonandschuster.ca

The back cover of Sonya Sones' What My Mother Doesn't Know practically blares, "One of the top 100 most banned books of the decade!"  So, needless to say, I was expecting something much more scandalous, or at the very least on the same level of unflinching detail as many of Judy Blume's novels.  What lies between the covers is the diary of an average fifteen-year-old girl that is far tamer than say, Blume's Forever or Deanie.  However, Sophie Stein, the protagonist, isn't vastly different from any other teenage girl.  She dates the seemingly perfect guy, finds out the inside of the package isn't nearly as attractive as the outside, breaks up, and then briefly considers dating someone she talks to online, but thankfully quickly discovers his true colors.  Sophie also has to deal with her parents' crumbling marriage, her rapidly changing body (thanks, puberty!), and her inexplicable feelings for Murphy, the geeky, awkward kid in class who's the butt of everyone's jokes. Mostly the novel traces the Sophie's growing maturity, as she learns to value people for who they are, rather than how they appear.

Sophie often feels alienated from her parents, something she relates in several separate poems.  Two entire poems deal with Sophie's feelings about her mother.  "Everyday When I Get Home From School" and "Her Soaps" discuss how Sophie's mother invests more emotional energy in the characters in a soap opera as opposed to her own family.  Sophie relates how when she got her first period, her mother just handed her the necessary supplies and left the room, "leaving [Sophie] with a box full of questions" (Sones 2001, 48).  Sophie and her mother don't see eye-to-eye in regards to many things: dresses for school dances and how to deal with boys among others.  It culminates in a nasty disagreement between the two of them, which concludes with the beginnings of a rapprochement.  "Maybe Dad Loves Me" delves into Sophie's emotionally distant and disengaged father, who rarely demonstrates physical affection with either his wife or daughter.  Sophie mentions that her father does seem to be aware of how much their disengagement affects her, even if he's unsure of how to change things.  Her main sources of emotional support are best friends Grace and Rachel.

The novel consists of a series of free-verse poems that are written in a confessional sort of style.  Sophie gushes over Dylan, her first boyfriend, and his "surfer boy smile on his lips, / the wind tossing his blond curls" (Sones 2001, 39).  The poems show a reflective young lady, who's not unwilling to examine her relationships and come to a sometimes-painful conclusion.  One of the poems that best exemplifies this is "At the County Fair" where Sophie describes what she and Dylan like to do at the county fair in a series of there-line stanzas.  Sophie's wistful musings alternate so that their mutual likes are juxtaposed against one another.  She says,

If only

Dylan liked

Ferris wheels.

If only

I liked

roller coasters.

.........................

If only

Dylan liked

horse shows.

If only 

I liked

video arcades.

If only

I had come with Rachel and Grace

instead. (Sones 2001, 81)

The repetition of "if only" presents a tone of deliberation as Sophie realizes their differences aren't necessarily "cute" and this might signal the end of her relationship.  There's a sense of sadness and finality, especially in the last line, because it consists of a single word that neatly encapsulates the inevitability that the relationship will not last much longer.

Sones makes good use of spacing to signal a transition to the next thought in the poem or a pause in Sophie's thoughts.  Sometimes, Sones also changes the size of the font, generally to indicate a train of thought that Sophie doesn't want to admit to feeling.  Sones also uses, from time to time, the physical appearance of the poem to illustrate Sophie's state of mind.  In "I Wish" the poem is shaped in an inverted triangle, growing smaller and smaller until the poem reaches its conclusion.  It's a reflection of Sophie’s current frame of mind and desire to be a tiny, petite thing, which is at complete odds with her actual physical stature.  She also employs different types of font to depict other people's written communications with Sophie.  Emails or instant messages from Grace and Rachel are written in neat and tidy fonts, while the messages from Chaz, the boy Sophie chats with online, are an untidy scrawl.  A unique aspect of the poems is how Sones uses the titles.  For the most part, they serve a double purpose, not only as the title, but also often as the first line of the poem.  They blend seamlessly into the rest of the poem, so you don't notice that when you've read the title, you've also read the first line of the poem.

One of the most charming, but ultimately not verbally poetic, elements of the novel are the series of drawings that evoke Renoir's La Bal à Bougival in the lower right corner of the book that create a flip book that shows the couple in the painting dancing and kissing one another.  La Bal à Bougival is Sophie's favorite painting, and she often imagines herself in the role of the young woman in the painting.  

Sones' poems in What My Mother Doesn't Know don't necessarily share the same delicate artistry as say, Jacqueline Woodson's in Brown Girl Dreaming or Nikki Grimes' in Words with Wings, but the thoughts easily flow, and present a reluctant reader an opportunity to read a novel with a great deal of character development.  Sophie is a relatable figure to almost any teenage girl (or grown woman) who engages in a seemingly never-ending struggle to beat their hair into submission for special occasions or makes the mistake of assuming that one's outside appeal is directly proportional to their internal appeal.  As someone with more than a few years on Sophie, I can say we've all been there.  We've all gotten into silly fights with our mothers.  We've all engaged in teasing the class outcast, even when we knew it was wrong, because we didn't want to become the outcast ourselves.  We've been the victims of casual discrimination based on our ethnicity, religion, gender or sexuality.  Sophie's experiences as related in this book are all the more poignant, because they are so familiar.  So while the language doesn't leap off the page in figurative linguistic flights of fancy, it doesn't lessen the impact of the poems.

The book has no table of contents, not even a rudimentary one, and no index to the poems in the novel.  It can make it quite difficult to locate a particular poem, especially in 259 pages of poetry.  

If you have reluctant or struggling female readers, this might be a good book for them to read if you're asking them to do a book talk or book trailer.  It's a nice, breezy read that has a nice plot and loads of character development, especially with Sophie as she gradually matures over the course of the book

Sones published a follow up to What My Mother Doesn't Know titled What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know.

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Spotlight on...

"I Dreamt About That White Dove Last Night"

We were flying together

over the streets of Boston.

I had these strong white wings

that knew just what to do.  

And when I woke up just now.

I started thinking about how

lots of people come to Boston

on vacation all the time.  

So I decided to pretend

I'm one of them today,

and take myself on a vacation.

Only I won't have to leave town to do it.  (Sones 2001, 173)

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There are a lot of things we can take away from this poem, but I'm more interested in vacationing in your hometown aspect of it.  We never really think about what there is to do in our hometowns, do we?  I did my undergrad program with a young man from a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. who rarely went into the city to see the sights, as it were.  They were just there, part of the landscape.

Sophie's poem made me think about how hard it is for even me, a non-native, but resident of Vancouver, to think about all the city has to offer.  So this poem made me really think about touring your hometown.  For this assignment, after the poem as been read to the class, the students will create a travel brochure for a vacation in their hometown.  Things they have to consider are: location, transportation availability, and cost.  Will they have a car or use public transit?  How much will it cost to park the car?  Use transit?  Does transit even go there?  How long are travel times?  Where would you want to eat meals?  How much will those meals cost?  Can you eat on a budget?  How much does it cost to go to the local attractions?  Students need to include contact information and/or websites for restaurants and attractions.

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Works Cited

Sones, Sonya. 2001. What My Mother Doesn't Know. New York: Simon & Schuster.