In my book club book, Bystander, many of the characters have social issues.

For example, Eric, the new kid in the 7th grade, is in need of new friends at his new school. But the one kid who wants to be Eric’s friend, Griffin, is the 7th grade bully. How can Eric be friends with Griffin and not become a bully or a target? After all, Eric doesn’t want to just be a bystander.

Another example is, Griffin, the 7th grade bully, wants to be friends with the new kid, Eric, but is having a hard time convincing Eric to be friends with him because it is pretty hard to convince people to be friends with you when you’re a bully. Griffin is showing Eric all the fun things you can do when you’re a bully but still feels that he hasn’t yet completely convinced Eric to stick with him.

Yet another social issue in this story is judging people by their cover. An example of this is when Griffin was at the supermarket and had charmed Eric’s mother into thinking that he had been helping elderly women carry their bags and that he didn’t accept pay. Later we find out that he would only help the wealthy women that he knew would return again and the reason he didn’t accept pay all of the time was because he was trying to build up the elderly women’s trust so that he got more pay when he did accept.

Something else going on in this book isn’t directly linked to social issues but is another problem linked to bullying, physical violence. Physical violence is a form of bullying that you can encounter when in very bad situation with a bully. Eric is physically bullied in chapter 22 when he finds out that this whole time Griffin was really just reeling him in closer and closer until Eric felt he could no longer fight back.

So as you can see in this book there are many issues and problems in the social category and all of them end up effecting Eric’s life dramatically. He was just a bystander watching it all happen and as he gets closer to the problem you see he gets into more issues and problems himself.