As both students and teachers, we all know this character. He is in every school - somewhere. Great selection for reluctant guy readers.

On the one hand, this is a fairly standard presentation of OCD, largely represented by extreme hand-washing and rituals. On the other hand, Foster does show us the depths of anxiety that ago hand in hand with OCD, so its more than just "I have to wash". Its "I'm worried about x an y and we're all going to die". And we see see the protagonist rationally understanding that his rituals have no bearing on reality but helpless to stop himself.
Then we have the bully, acting out over fear an grief since his brother's arrest, lead into increasingly bad behavior by a "bad element". This is fairly cliche. While we do come to see him as a more complete person, really its only the two kids who have any complexity. There was the opening forays of exploration of the way the various parents deal with difficult and stressful situations but those ideas were not fully realized.

I have been looking forward to reading "All The Things That Could Go Wrong" for weeks and was excited to see it added as a Junior Library Guild title. I developed a greater empathy for students with OCD as well as students caught in a bully image of themselves, which is difficult to break free from. I also appreciated that one of the characters was in the corrective system. I feel that this issue should be discussed more in middle school grade literature. I will recommend this book to students interested in, or wanting to know more about OCD, mental health, juvenile justice, bullying, and empathy.

This is such an important story. It's easy to have compassion for Alex, but this also helps the reader have compassion for Dan. Yes, he's a jerk. But there's so much going on with his life that it's easy to understand why he's so awful. (Also, he gets better and I'm a huge fan of personal growth.)

But Alex's story is still the better (and more heartbreaking) one. I can't imagine having OCD and just seeing how Alex knew how disordered his thoughts were and he knew things weren't the way he perceived them. Even so, he was still powerless to stop obsessing about things.

This book would be a great tool to help young readers cultivate empathy. It could help people understand exactly why Alex is so unusual and also why Dan is so mean a lot of the time.

Recommended.

I enjoyed this book but I found it a little choppy. I appreciated Foster's courage to write from both POVs of a bully and a victim. Foster's writing was clear, vivid and emotionally charged. It wasn't a thriller but a book to sit with and think about.