One of those hideous books where the mother dies

Overview

Sonya Sones tells Ruby's story entirely in free verse, a choice that compresses a teenager's grief and anger into short, charged bursts rather than long explanatory prose. Ruby is fifteen when her mother dies, and the novel picks her up at the moment her life is uprooted a second time: she's sent across the country from Boston to Los Angeles to live with a father who is, to her, essentially a stranger.

That father happens to be a famous actor, which complicates everything. Ruby arrives determined to resent him, both for his absence and for the surreal mismatch between his public persona and the private relationship she never had with him. The verse format lets Sones move quickly between sarcasm, sorrow, and the disorienting pull of a new life Ruby never asked for.

Much of the book's tension comes from Ruby's refusal to let go of her anger even as her circumstances change around her — new school, new city, a father trying belatedly to connect. The result is less a plot-driven story than a portrait of a girl working through loss on her own stubborn terms.

A Grief Story Told in Fragments

Sones built much of her career writing verse novels for teenagers, and this book sits alongside her other work in treating adolescent emotional upheaval as worthy of serious, unsentimental attention. The fragmented, poem-by-poem structure mirrors how grief actually arrives — not as a tidy narrative but in disconnected flashes of memory, irritation, and longing. For reluctant readers, the format also lowers the barrier to entry: white space and short lines make heavy subject matter feel less daunting on the page.

The novel's premise — swapping an ordinary, grief-stricken life for a glamorous and alien one — lets Sones needle at the gap between celebrity image and private reality. Ruby's father is adjusting to fatherhood in the public eye, while Ruby is adjusting to mourning in a house that isn't home, surrounded by people who know her father's name before they know hers. That friction keeps the book from reading as a simple grief narrative or a simple celebrity-kid narrative; it's interested in how those two experiences distort each other.

Why One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies Has Been Challenged

Reviewers and teen readers have generally praised the book for its candor — the way it lets a grieving teenager be bitter, sarcastic, and unresolved rather than tidily redeemed by the final page. That same candor is precisely what has drawn objections from some parents and school officials, who argue the honesty tips into material unsuitable for the young audience the verse format is designed to attract. This title has been challenged or restricted in 1 state and 1 district tracked in this catalog.

The specific complaints center on Ruby's voice as a typical, unfiltered teenager: passages touching on sexual curiosity and experience, references to drinking and drug use among teens, and language considered crude or profane for a school setting. Critics of the restrictions counter that these elements are part of what makes Ruby's grief feel authentic rather than sanitized, and that removing them would undercut the book's honesty about how teenagers actually talk and think while processing loss.