Concerning & Potentially Concerning Content

There is a lot of dialogue in here that parents will be sadly familiar with. This is seen almost all the way throughout the book in an attempt at humor. Examples: “Dwight was a total loser. I’m not saying that as an insult.” “That makes him a total loser” Describing other boys, “most people won’t talk with them… Lance is weird and Mike cries all the time”. To an embarrassing kid, “Ugh, can’t you crawl back into your hole?” A character sees “Kellen drinks pee” on the school bathroom” (sadly Kellen assumes his friend did it) “Barfing in class” “All these stupid, clumsy, loudmouth boys” The following terms appear, several are used over and over: nerds, weird, stupid, depraved, fart face, twerp, jerk, full of crap, annoying, idiot, giant goober, poop, barf, dumbest, dork, shut-up, loser. You get the picture. Another concerning aspect of this book comes from the crush the main character has on a classmate. At one point he wants to invite a different girl to dance, but he really just hopes it makes his crush, who is dating someone else, jealous. Later he refers to this girl as “the girl I’ve been thinking about nonstop since the first day of school”. There is actually a decent amount of material around people liking each other (in the romantic sense). Other things to be aware of: A picture compares a teacher to Jabba the Hut. We read the following flippant, unfortunate statements: holy Wompa hair, holy Jabba the Hutt, Hallelujah! Thank Jabba the Hutt that’s over There is an instance of seemingly randomly looking things up on YouTube A girl admits to not paying attention in class. An R-rated movie comes up. A character says that everyone was going, but their parents wouldn’t let him. A fight between two boys occurs.