Students seeking an easy read novel in verse with a rags-to-riches plotline may find what they are looking for in Sones’ One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies. Set in contemporary Beverly Hills, the sixteen year old narrator tells her story of loss, transplantation, meeting her estranged movie-star father, and adjustment and betrayal through poems and emails. Funny and over-the-top, One of Those Hideous Books is a quick read with no chapter breaks. Recommended for independent reading and available for book groups via the Great Stories Club grants Passages received.
Sones, Sonya. One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.
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I was very surprised that our female students really took to it during last year's GSC group. I assumed that a narrator that complains about being whisked off to Hollywood to live the life of the rich and famous with her movie star father would be too difficult to relate to. I may have been projecting a bit here. In light of that, what I do think they connected to, or at least what drew them in, was the narrator's dramatization of her life, certainly the plot line about the boyfriend-stealing best friend, and the narrator's sense of injustice at almost everything happening to her. Many of the girls went on to read Sones' other books.
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