ISBN: 0689841140.
This collection of poems is about the life of a high school student, named Sophie. The collection reads just like a novel. The poems are narrative and cover several months of her life. The poems focus on her relationships with friends, boys and her family.
Some of the poems have line breaks that make the rhythm choppy, but I found myself ignoring the line breaks most of the time and just reading the poems as chapters of a novel. There is hardly any rhyming used in the collection, but there are a few instances of rhymes. An example is �I kiss my knee/ and pretend it�s you/ I know it�s dumb/ But I do� from �Confession.� Alliteration is also scarce, but one instance is �cold cucumber cure� from �I�ve Got This Problem with Crying.�
Sones uses a lot of figurative language and sense imagery. Some examples of similes are �heavy clouds hang low/ like a thick gray soup� (�Gray Sky Blues�) and the comparison of tears to a �swarm of angry bees� (�Tears�). An example of a metaphor is the comparison of Dylan�s hair to Astroturf in �Dylan�s Buzz Cut.� The senses of touch, sight and hearing are all touched on throughout the poems. One example of sense imagery using touch would be in �In the Movie Theater� when Sophie describes how it feels when a boy�s lips brush against her ear. What�s unique about the figurative language and the sense imagery in these poems is that not only does Sones use it to help the reader visualize what is going on in the poems; it also helps to characterize Sophie as someone who is artsy, creative and dramatic.
The poems in the collection are all basically in the same format and don�t vary drastically from one another. They are arranged in chronological order and cover a few months of Sophie�s life. Some background is given on the author, and this information adds depth to the poems. Sones used her own memories of how it felt to first fall in love while she was writing this collection. After reading that, I felt that the poems seemed even more realistic because they were based on the author�s actual feelings.
The collection has no table of contents or index. The collection is rather lengthy, so a table of contents or first line index would have been quite helpful. However, I think it would have detracted from the narrative feel of the collection if an index had been included.
There is certainly evidence of a strong persona as you are reading the poems. You feel like you really know Sophie and her personality. There is also authenticity of voice because not only do you feel like you know Sophie, but you believe that she could be a real person and you believe the things she says. This collection is definitely not appropriate for younger readers because of the language and sexual content. Teens as well as older readers will be able to relate to these poems and to Sophie�s experiences.
