LS 5623 Stop Pretending

Sones, Sonya. Stop Pretending. HarperTempest: New York, 1999.

ISBN: 0-06-446218-8

Thirteen year old Cookie's life changes suddenly when her older sister has a psychotic break one Christmas Eve. Cookie is startled by the strangers her family becomes in those few transforming moments; her sister becomes wild-eyed and frenetic, her father, a man she no longer recognizes, and her mother becomes unreliable in a crisis when she was the one that they turned to before Using sparse words and poetry, Sonya Sones brings to the reader Cookie's journey as she struggles with her new life without her sister, who has been put in a mental hospital. Since her sister has turned into a stranger that sometimes no longer recognizes Cookie or herself, Cookie sometimes struggles to accept that her sister may be forever changed: "I don't want to see you. / I dread it. / There. / I've said it."

While the book may be short, it is full of insight. When her abbreviated family finally begins to accept that they may no longer have another active member of the family, Cookie writes as her family snuggles under a blanket watching TV that "And tonight, / for once, / it feels okay / to just be / three." I posit Stop Pretending can be appreciated as an exercise as the stages of grief; Cookie enters a state of shock in “My Sister’s Christmas Eve Breakdown,” feels pain and guilt in “Hospitalized,” is angry in “New Year’s Eve,” during the bridge of the book, she reflects during her return to school in “In Art Class” and “At Lunch” among others, she starts to adjusts in “Slumber Party Levitation” and “In Gym Class,” she begins to work through her situation and reconstruct her life without her sister in “The Best May 2^nd of My Life,” and finally there is acceptance and hope “In the Visiting Room.” This book can also be a good way to demonstrate that death is not always a cause for a grieving process.

The October 1999 edition of the School Library Journal calls Stop Pretending “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.” Recommended is another prose poetry book titled Seventeen by Liz Rosenberg about a girl who worries about inheriting mental illness from her mother.