Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie
Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Jordan Sonnenblick on Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A student he couldn’t help, a book that didn’t existSonnenblick was teaching 8th grade English in New Jersey in 2002-03 when one of his students arrived carrying a weight he could see but she rarely named: her younger brother was in cancer treatment. He went looking for a novel she could read.
I wrote this book because when I went to find a book that would help my student to deal with her family’s crisis, I couldn’t find one.
Finding no book on the shelf was the trigger, but Sonnenblick draws a sharp line between what prompted him and where the actual story came from. The student gave him urgency; his own life gave him the material.
I didn’t get the idea for [Drums] from her, but I wrote it for her.
Casting an older sibling as narrator rather than the sick child at the center was the book’s first structural decision, and it followed directly from who was sitting in his classroom. His student was not the one who was ill.
the fact that the older sibling is the narrator is because my inspiration for the book was an older sibling.
Steven’s most defining behavior, retreating from everyone around him and telling no one what his family is enduring, came from Sonnenblick’s own adolescence. His parents divorced during his high school years, and the six months he spent pulling away from the world became the emotional architecture of Steven’s silence.
The isolation was absolutely integral from the get-go. I was going on my own experience of my parents’ getting divorced during my high school years; there was a six-month period when I withdrew completely. Ultimately, secrets are isolating.
How he wrote it
Twelve weeks, one pediatric oncologist, and a typographical accidentSonnenblick wrote the manuscript in twelve weeks, teaching all day and writing after his children went to bed, because he wanted it finished and in his student’s hands. Accuracy about cancer treatment was non-negotiable, and he had one research advantage that no amount of library time could replicate.
The research task was massive; I wanted to write about cancer realistically enough that the book would stand up to the most intense scrutiny from people who knew EVERYTHING about cancer. Fortunately, my childhood best friend is a pediatric oncologist, so he was my research guru.
Getting the medicine right was the technical challenge. The emotional challenge was Jeffrey, the younger brother whose cheerful, unsuspecting personality Sonnenblick modeled on his own son Ross, who was five years old while the manuscript was being written.
It was truly wrenching to put this beautiful paper child, who ‘felt’ like my son to me, through the agonies of cancer treatment.
One of the book’s most discussed formal features, italicized dialogue throughout the novel that abruptly shifts to standard quotation marks in the final chapter, has generated years of classroom analysis. Sonnenblick’s explanation upends every theory.
I truthfully have no idea how or why I chose the italics throughout, capped off by the quotation marks at the end. I just knew while I was writing that the italics were adding to the internal intensity. Then when I got to the last chapter, the quotes felt right. I know that sounds horribly anti-analytical.
He was concentrating so hard on the cancer scenes and the wording of individual lines that the formal decisions happened below conscious thought. He asked, on record, that no one tell his students or his editor.
The drums in the title are not a metaphor added after the fact. Jazz was what Sonnenblick had loved as a teenager, and he wrote the music into Steven’s life because no book had ever captured, for him, what it actually feels like to play.
The music is in there because playing jazz is what I loved when I was a teenager. And I always wished someone would write a teen book that nailed down how I feel when I play the drums.
The personal thread
Frank McCourt’s lesson about laughter and lossThe novel moves between comedy and devastation in a way that could easily tip into tonal disaster. Sonnenblick’s control of that balance has a specific origin: his high school creative writing teacher was Frank McCourt, who taught the principle years before publishing the memoir that made him famous.
I’ve learned from Frank McCourt, partly because he was my high school writing teacher and also from Angela’s Ashes, that the funniest parts of life are often wrapped around the saddest parts. It’s the bonus that makes life livable.
Beneath the humor and the family crisis, the book is built on a conviction that is Sonnenblick’s own and not merely Steven’s. It is less a theme he constructed than a belief he already held.
I basically think the world is a hard place, so people have to be good to each other.
What he wants us to sit with
The reader he wrote for, and who wrote backThe publication story of the book was nearly a catastrophe. His first publisher released the hardcover in June 2004 and shut its doors three weeks later, leaving 4,000 of 5,000 copies unsold. Sonnenblick donated every one of them to SuperSibs!, an organization that supports siblings of pediatric cancer patients. That act of routing the book to exactly the readers he had imagined turned out to describe who found it once Scholastic stepped in. His fan mail, after the novel eventually sold 750,000 copies across 15 languages, confirmed the audience he had always pictured.
probably the most disproportionate segment of my fan mail comes from cancer siblings, followed by parents of reluctant readers who are glad their kids found a book to love.
Fan mail is one measure. School visits are another. When Sonnenblick names the moments that have stayed with him from years of appearing before readers, he returns to a specific and recurring scene.
my favorite moments have consistently come when siblings of children with medical issues have approached me to say that DRUMS has helped them to feel they aren’t alone.