Sonya Sones is the author of two highly acclaimed young adult novels-in-verse: the 1999 title Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy and 2001's What My Mother Doesn't Know. Both of these books feature young teenage girls confronted with dramatic if not possibly traumatic situations. In the first, Sones drew upon a real-life experience, recounting in verse one teen's impressions of her older sister's nervous breakdown and subsequent hospitalization for manic depression. In What My Mother Doesn't Know Sones writes about a young girl names Sophie who is desperate for attention and trying to figure out the difference between love and lust.

"People often talk about having an inner child," Sones said in an acceptance speech for the Claudia Lewis Award, reprinted on the Bank Street College Web site. "But I have an inner teenager." It is this "inner teenager" that Sones mines in her award-winning...