Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie

About Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie

Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie is a young adult novel by Jordan Sonnenblick, published by Scholastic. The novel is narrated by Steven Alper, an eighth-grader who plays drums in the school jazz band, is nursing a crush on a girl named Renee, and fully expects the year to be his best one yet. Then his five-year-old brother Jeffrey is diagnosed with leukemia, and everything that seemed important to Steven shifts violently out of proportion.

The novel unfolds through Steven's first-person voice, and his narration is one of its great strengths. He is funny, self-deprecating, and honest about the ways he handles crisis — which is to say, badly at first. He makes selfish choices. He resents Jeffrey for taking over his parents' attention. He struggles with guilt over feeling resentful at all. Sonnenblick does not pretend that family illness is ennobling by default; he shows what it actually does to a teenage boy who did not ask for this and doesn't know how to carry it.

A Family Under Pressure

The novel's emotional core is its portrayal of how a family reorganizes under the pressure of a child's serious illness. Steven's parents are stretched thin — financially, emotionally, and physically. The household that existed before the diagnosis slowly becomes unrecognizable. Steven watches this happen and has no way to stop it, which is the particular helplessness the book captures so well: the experience of being old enough to understand what is happening but too young to do anything about it.

At the same time, the novel is often genuinely funny. Sonnenblick's humor — rooted in Steven's sardonic voice and his middle-school social anxieties — keeps the book from becoming a simple exercise in suffering. The title itself comes from a moment of domestic comedy involving Jeffrey, a can of Reddi-wip, and the kitchen floor, which Steven gets to clean up. That collision of sorrow and absurdity is what the novel is actually about: the way families go on, mess and all.

Why Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie Has Been Challenged

The novel has been banned pending investigation in Escambia County Public Schools in Florida. The school district's broad-based review of library materials has swept up numerous books, and Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie — a novel about a boy dealing with his brother's cancer — is among them. It is a measure of how expansive some of these review processes have become that a book widely used in middle school classrooms and praised by educators for its emotional honesty and humor would be placed under scrutiny.

The book has long been a classroom staple for its ability to open conversations about illness, family change, and the experience of being a sibling during a medical crisis. For many students, it provides language and a framework for something they may be living through. Restricting access to that kind of resource does not protect students; it isolates them.