Probably the biggest thing to realize is that at the start of the book, before his transformation, the main character Jake is not a great child role-model. He is “not really into learning stuff”, commenting that he can just look it up on his phone. He asks his best friend to skip a boring homeroom to go and play games on his phone. He comments that “straight Cs” is fine with him. He jokes about not helping around the house. He also says he often “doesn’t bother with homework”. Comments that middle-schoolers need more time for video games and texting. He grows a ton during the book, but this first part of the book is a bit rough.

His best friend Kojo loves old detective shows, which are all mentioned by name: Columbo, Shaft, Kojak, Hawaii Five-O. His friend comments “too much TV? No such thing”.

Jake and his sister sneak into his mother’s work for a meal. Kojo and Jake lie to their moms about basketball practice to sneak out. Later all 3 lie to sneak out again.

The other main character Grace is looking for an example to teach Jake’s sister something in Spanish. She is looking for ‘something that changes’ and uses ‘being in love with someone’, a bad message this culture pushes.

A few other items:

The term “idiot” is used. There is a mention of “fate” doing something. At one point Kojo says, “he wants to communicate with Grace Harper, if you know what I mean by ‘communicate’”. At one point when a character mentions something impressive from the past a response comes that, “remember, they didn’t have TV or video games back then. There wasn’t much to do except build stuff”.

The villain comments that the show CBS Sunday Mornings is what “all the smart people watch when they should be sleeping”.

There is also a reference to the rapper Macklemore and the Transformers movie.