I remember being bullied as a small boy — I must have been 6 or 7 years old. The bullies were strangers to me, and I imagine they picked on me because I was a timid bookworm who was no good at sports. Of course, it feels shameful to be bullied, and I didn’t tell anyone. It didn’t happen very often anyway. Soon I grew taller than the bullies, and then they stopped bothering me. I wonder whether a book like this might have been useful to me at the time.

Bully is about how Mickey’s friend Jack starts to bully him, and what Mickey does to try to deal with the problem. Mickey seems to have a happy functional family and he is able to tell them about what Jack is doing to him. Nobody suggests going to the school principal, or the school counselor, or bringing in any other authority figure. Instead they give Mickey suggestions about what he might do. Interestingly, their ideas don’t help much at first. It seems that his mother’s suggestion of being nice to Jack pays off, but it also seems that a lot of the change in Jack is due what is going on in his life. His mother just had a baby, and Jack also has got new braces on his teeth. The book suggests that Jack is not a nasty person in himself, but rather is acting badly because of worries he has about himself and his role in his family. The illustrations are very nice: bright colors, strong lines, and lots of detail. They really add to the story and give the characters more depth.

This story may well help some children understand why sometimes their friends are nasty to them. However, unless the psychological dynamics between children have radically changed in the last thirty years, Bully isn’t about bullying in its main form. Being a bully is an identity that children often take on for months or years–it gives them power and makes other children fear them. Furthermore, some children are more likely to be bullied than others–they are the weak geeks and freaks. There’s not much in this book to help the picked-on deal with their predicament, unless being nice to bullies is really a good solution, and I don’t think it will help very often.

So if you are looking for a book to guide children on how to cope with bullies, I’d recommend looking further than Bully. Nevertheless, this book is still insightful about what causes some boys and girls to turn against their friends and it might be helpful for all sorts of children, even though I don’t think it would have helped me much when I was being bullied all those years ago.

Categories: Fiction, SelfHelp