Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy
Continuously in print for nearly two decades, this groundbreaking and profoundly moving story told in verse, from award-winning author Sonya Sones, has been repackaged with a striking new cover and bonus content.
When her beloved older sister is hospitalized after a sudden mental breakdown, Cookie is left behind to cope with a family torn apart by grief, friends who shun her, and her fear that she, too, might one day lose her mind.
Based on award-winning author Sonya Sones's own true story, this novel explores the chilling landscape of mental illness, revealing glimmers of beauty and of hope along the way. Told in a succession of short and powerful poems, it takes us deep into the cyclone of the narrator's emotions: despair, anger, guilt, resentment, and ultimately, acceptance.
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"The poems have a cumulative emotional power." -- ALA Booklist (starred review)
"Heartfelt." -- KLIATT (starred review)
"The poems take on life and movement, the individual frames of a movie that in the unspooling become animated, telling a compelling tale." -- Kirkus Reviews
"Unpretentious. Accessible. Deeply felt." -- School Library Journal
"Sensitively written." -- The Horn Book
"This debut novel shows the capacity of poetry to record the personal and translate it into the universal." -- Chicago Tribune
"Stop Pretending is a tour de force debut. It celebrates truth-telling, and has a purity and passion that speaks to the heart." -- Boston Globe
