This book consists of page after page of intense self-loathing over being overweight. This is really surprising because the whole book revolves around a single comment from a mean boy moving Will, the main character, from being happy and content with his life to utterly depressed. At one point he says that 3 years later he has thought of the comment every single day. His depression pushes his group of very close friends away. He sits on a bucket alone in the corner of the lunchroom. This is a single comment that sends his life off the rails. Young readers read Will say that a comment like this causes you to “become your own bully”, but we never hear that it doesn’t have to be that way. To make things worse, the graphic novel format really expands the impact of the self-loathing on the reader because much of the illustrations center around this negativity. At one point Will refers to “my sad, crappy, pathetic life” (his life that was shown as happy before “the comment”). He also comments, “stupid, stupid, stupid. You are so stupid” (to himself). It is a heavy, negative feel to even an adult reader, let alone a child.
This spiraling leads to Will moving into multiple types of eating disorder behavior, all of which is shown in a decent amount of detail. He binge eats. He hurts himself. He starts to hear “a voice” in his head growing more and more negative saying things like, “No more pizza for big fat stupid ugly you”. All of this is hidden away from his parents.
This book does include a content warning, which is nice given everything above, but it was added in a place that is very easy to miss, especially for young readers used to jumping to the start of a story. Also, unfortunately, the warning content is specific only to eating disorders.
A few other items to be aware of:
The term “fat” and others like it appear so, so many times. We see it over and over in his head and illustrated on the page.
We also see these items, some several times: jerk, idiot, loser, suck, crap, screw it, stupid, dumb.
After the mean kid makes “the comment”, his friends come to try and cheer him up by calling the boy a jerk, idiot and loser and then make a joke about the boy’s height, which cheers Will up a bit.
For a while we were worried when another character, a boy, shows up and hits it off with Will. At first Will almost seems obsessed with him. We began to get worried, especially since the new boy had pink fingernails the first day, but this settles into what seems to be a totally platonic friendship.