Stop Pretending

Sones, Sonya. Stop Pretending. New York: Harper Collins, 1999.
ISBN 0-06-446218-8



Summary:

Stop Pretending is a powerful, purposeful collection of poetry by Sonya Sones. It tells a story in fragments of poems that creates a deeper meaning than paragraphs after paragraph could describe. She chronicles her emotions after her sister was diagnosed as manic depressive. Stop Pretending is also the title of one of the poems that describes her feelings about the way her family and friends react to her sister’s break down.

Sones uses poetic devises beautifully, for example: one poem is titled “REALITEASE,” a pun, as Cookie questions whether the reality of the matter is that her sister has gone crazy and she is sane, or if in truth Cookie is the one who has gone crazy. The poems range from sweet to disturbing giving a full range to the emotion a young teenager might feel in this situation. One sweet poem called “MIDNIGHT SWING” remembers when Cookie’s sister “helped [her] climb up/ and taught [her] to pump” One more disturbing poem describes Cookie getting lost in the ward, and a nice nurse helping her find her way back to the elevator. It ends with,

“Just as the doors close,
I see that she’s drooling,
And rocking, and rocking, and rocking.”

showing that Cookie not only is upset by the events going on in her life, but that she can’t tell who is sane anymore. She is so desperate for someone to reach out to her at this point that she didn’t even notice that the helpful nurse was really a patient in the psychiatric ward.

Reviews

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 . . .
Kirkus Reviews

Enrichment Activity
This genre of book particularly allows for transition into a longer poem, such as an epic like, The Odyssey, or a Shakespeare play as it is a less intimidating version of the same concept. Stop Pretending would be a great read aloud to do before Shakespeare’s Othello, where there is truly pretending going on or Hamlet in which there is a lot of question of his an other characters’ mental stability. This would also serve older students in preparing to write poetry about themselves. After listening to one poem from this book read aloud, students could create their own poem to be shared with the class, or simply kept in their journals.