The Bully Book: A Novel

by Eric Kahn Gale

Overview

What is The Bully Book? Part mystery, part tragedy, part comedy. Originally self-published as an ebook by a member of Team Starkid, The Bully Book is now available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions. The paperback includes a Q&A with the author.

Eric Haskins, the new sixth-grade bully target, is searching for answers. And unlike many of us who experienced something awful growing up, he finds them. Though they may not be what he expected.

When the author was eleven, he was bullied. This book is loosely based on incidents that happened to him in sixth grade.

The Bully Book is a Top Ten Indie Next List pick of 2013, and Publishers Weekly called The Bully Book a "gripping debut novel."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062125132
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	09/03/2013
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	163,760
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.66(d)
Lexile:	HL620L (what's this?)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Eric Kahn Gale is the author of The Bully Book, his first novel. He lives in Chicago.

Editorial Reviews

Eric was a pretty normal kid going into sixth grade, but things turned ugly very quickly. With the exception of Melody and Colin, the whole class began to pick on Eric. When Colin's older brother mentions "The Book" and how a "grunt" is selected each year, Eric concludes that he has been chosen. Following various clues, he eventually locates the manual. He discovers that the book has been handed down from class to class and dates back many years. The "grunt" is always a kid like Eric who is average and passively accepts the label bestowed upon him. Eric takes steps to counteract the book's poison by rotating its pages with his own painful journal entries. Passing down this revised Bully Book will expose this hurtful tradition and, hopefully, lessen its power. With the voice of the book's original writer juxtaposed with Eric's, this novel grabs the reader at page one. Interspersed humor (bloody boogers and body fluids) lightens the serious tone and the mystery about the manual's author continues almost to the end. Calling upon his own unhappy experiences, the author demonstrates how easily bully Jason "Crazypants" and his lieutenants implement the book's toxic plan for classroom dominance; however, the novel's message about the importance of self-awareness and other tools needed to lessen the impact of bullying is equally forceful. Although it targets the middle school set, this novel will furnish teachers, parents, and teens with ammunition to combat this cruel conundrum. Reviewer: Barbara Johnston

VOYA - Barbara Johnston

This gripping debut novel, previously published by the author as an e-book, explores school bullying and power dynamics from perspectives at both the top and the bottom of the classroom social order. Excerpts from “the Bully Book” address readers directly, explaining how to rise to a position of power (“You need to pick lieutenants, loyal friends who can help you carry out instructions”) at the expense of the “Grunt,” a student singled out for abuse. Sixth-grader Eric Haskins writes intervening journal entries that detail his growing awareness that he has become his grade’s targeted Grunt. Using the Bully Book’s guidance, three boys mount a step-by-step campaign of psychological warfare against Eric, sabotaging his few friendships, turning classmates against him, and collapsing his self-esteem. Yet an inner resilience emerges as Eric tries to unravel the origins of the Book, a layered and attention-grabbing mystery. Gale’s accounts of bullying are subtle and chilling, but readers will finish the book believing that the humiliations Eric suffers can be conquered. Ages 8–12. Agent: Erica Rand Silverman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

A meticulous anatomy of a bullying victim. Determinedly normal Eric Haskins is dumbfounded when his best friend, just back from camp, joins with a couple of other boys to call him "Grunt" at the beginning of sixth grade. Pretty soon, Eric is the class pariah; even decent and stalwart Melody turns away. A couple of chance remarks convince Eric that he's just the latest in a long line of sixth-grade Grunts and that the bullies are actually working from a manual. Readers know that Eric's right, because interspersed with his journal entries chronicling his miserable year are excerpts from the titular Bully Book, which advises, "You have to create yourself. And to keep yourself safe, you have to create other people too, like the Grunt." Eric's quest to uncover the Bully Book is genuinely suspenseful. The juxtaposition of Eric's journal against the Bully Book allows readers to see both the bullies' methodology and Eric's unwitting complicity. Gale gutsily portrays a gloves-off sixth-grade classroom in which variations of "gay" are flung around as insults (a usage that Eric articulately and bravely challenges). While it's hard to imagine even the numbest substitute teacher routinely allowing a vocabulary lesson to become a bullying opportunity ("Eric Haskins is generally stupid"), the other adults in Eric's life are convincingly ineffectual or self-deluded. A compelling and unusual look at a complex and intractable problem that succeeds admirably as story as well. (Fiction. 8-12)

Kirkus Reviews