What My Girlfriend Doesn’t Know

Sones, Sonya. What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know. ISBN-10: 0689876033, ISBN-13: 9780689876035. Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing. 2007.

Summary
What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know is a sequel to What My Mother Doesn't Know. However we now get to hear from Robin Murphy, Sophie's sweet and artsy boyfriend. Everyone at school is as shocked at their relationship as Robin is, and because of it, Sophie and Robin are made to be outcasts in all of the social circles. And Robin is questioning the value of actually getting the thing you most want.

Critical Evaluation
In this novel that picks up where What My Mother Doesn't Know left off, Sonya Sones uses her familiar sparse free verse to tell Robin's side of the story and how he feels about Sophie. He knows she's now a social outcast because she is with him, and it's hard for him to see her suffering for being with him. He finds a bit of respite from the hard times of their high school when he enrolls in a college drawing class. Girls will be torn for their feelings of popularity and the love of Robin when reading this book. Guys will understand Robin's awkwardness and understand his torn feelings and the uncertainty about his sometimes-uncomfortable relationship with Sophie when a college student from his class takes an interest in him. All teen readers will appreciate both of the character's flaws, and applaud when they stand up to the bullies together!

Reader's Annotation
We met Sophie in What My Mother Doesn't Know, and now we get to meet her boyfriend, Robin Murphy. The couple is ridiculed and alienated at school, but come together to face their adversity.

About the Author
Sonya Sones has spent most of her life drawing, animating or editing something or another. The Boston native was educated at Hampshire college, has taught a Harvard, worked in the movies as an editor and painted baby clothes for Neiman Marcus stores before enrolling in a poetry class at University of California-Los Angeles. She had an influential professor who guided her into writing her first book Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy in 1999. In over the decade, she has written four young adult novels, three short stories and one children's picture book—Violet and Winston—with her husband Bennett Tramer.

In her young adult novels, Sones incorporates bits of herself in each. Inspired by her professor and the actual events surrounding her mentally ill sister, Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy was written (1999). Sones was writing poems about her first love, and then she started thinking about all of the "firsts" in a young girl's life, and she used those thoughts for What My Mother Doesn't Know (2003). Next she incorporated her own story of an East coast girl moving to the West for One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies (2004). But then What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know (2007) came from letters asking the author for what happened next in Sophie's story. Sones says she wanted to know what happened too. Sones is currently working on her fifth novel.

Genre
Poetry and Verse
Dating and Sex
Adolescence

Challenges
Sexual Content

Curriculum Ties
English: writing a complete story in verse

Booktalking Ideas
How would you handle your whole school making fun of you and your new boyfrien…
Is it more important to be popular than to be happy…

Awards
n/a

Reading Level/Interest Age
Ages 14+

Why I included this title...
I wanted to see what happened with Sophie and Murphy, so I had to read it!