What My Mother Doesn't Know

Sophie is an artistic and talented high school freshman who falls in and out of love very quickly with a handsome boy named Dylan. She has some serious problems in her life, like parents who are not too interested in what she is doing and who argue with each other all the time. When her best friends, Grace and Rachel, go on vacations for Christmas break, Sophie finally falls for a guy for reasons beyond his appearance. Too bad it is Murphy, the school's social outcast. Sophie's choice between making her friends happy and making her happy defines the moral of the story.

Some awards this book has won, include Booklist Editor's Choice, ALA 2002 Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, the Iowa Teen Award, and ALA 2002 Best Book for Young Adults. What My Mother Doesn't Know also found a place on Amazon.com's best seller list.

The poetry in this book is dramatically simple, but Sones intelligently uses line breaks as pauses to convey Sophie's strong emotions as she falls in and out and in and out of love. Taken out of context of the plot, some of the poems reach far into the emotions surrounding teen angst, new love, and fading love. As a teen, I remember having these emotions within the span of 20 minutes, so it didn't bother me to see them in the span of 4 pages.

A poem on page 66 titled I Wish would be an excellent tool to use to discuss writing shaped poetry. The poem ends with one word at the bottom of a funnel and gives readers a feeling that Sophie feels like she is spiraling, either out of control or into love--she doesn't really know. Many other individual poems could be used out of context for quality examples, specifically those that address Sophie's emotions of love and loving someone she probably should not. Using one of this poems would also give a teacher or a librarian an easy transition to book talk the book to the entire class.

I believe that this is a cleverly written book. However, I worry about some of the lessons that girls could take away from reading it. Boys are not disposable and they don't always understand when you break up with them because you feel like it. While the book ends with a positive moral, stay true to yourself and what you love, I'm not sure that a teen struggling to fit in would walk away from this story with that lesson.

Also, I recently asked a friend what the dirtiest book she had ever read was. Her reply, without too much delay, was What My Mother Doesn't Know. I was surprised because I really didn't find this to be what I would consider a dirty book. However, if you take all the moments where Sophie is talking about kissing Murphy or Dylan or sneaking around to "hang out" with one of them and think about it as sex, I would understand why someone would think this is a "dirty book," because that is pretty my the entire book. In a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly, the direct comment was made "Sones poignantly captures the tingle and heartache of being young and boy-crazy." I simply think that there was to much "tingle" for my friend.

This book could be a precursor to some of the Ellen Hopkins books that address more mature issues like Crank and Impulse. What my Mother Doesn't Know is a very simple book to book talk in a library setting because it is a quick read for the librarian and sharing a few pages of poems could be quite enticing to a female reader. I would recommend having a document camera handy to show the shape of poems to the class.

This book would be popular among girls in 5th through 8th grades. As stated previously, some of the poems in this book address love and falling in love very well. The sing-song pattern of some more juvenile poetry books is missing and thus adds to the appeal for slightly older readers.

Reference:

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