Concerning & Potentially Concerning Content

There are only a handful of things to know about in this book. The biggest item comes at the end when an adult tells a group of kids to keep his secret between them. This is meant to be an innocent thing, but it is an opportunity to talk with our children about how important it is to come to you if someone says something like this in real life. There is another instance where the main character decides not to tell his family about a development in his life, something strange, because he thinks they will freak out. --- Another important part to discuss comes when a group of friends need a way to leave an event to go and help their buddy and all choose to fake stomachaches to do this. While this keeps the story progressing it is obviously not something we would want our children feeling is justified. --- While the artwork is all very solid and light, there is one strange instance where a girl shows the main character Ted her notebook and a seemingly out of place, slightly darker picture of a skull is shown. --- The early part of the story revolves around people picking on Ted. While this is light, words like nerd and weird are used. It is always shown as wrong (and not celebrated as we see in many of the graphic novels that are trying to be funny today) --- Ted’s friend is a boy whose name is “Stacy”, but he is an obviously boy character. He is picked on for his name, which he says is a family name that is more common in Europe (there is zero signs of any type of more recent agenda pushing here). He is actually a really kind character and good friend to Ted. --- There is a mention of a local urban legend and Ted comments, “Giant kid-eating racoon is the last of my worries.”