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.

Foster, Stewart. All the Things that Could Go Wrong. Little, Brown BYR 2018.

Alex has OCD which is seriously affecting his ability to do his schoolwork and interact with his classmates. Dan's older brother has been incarcerated, and Dan's so angry about this that he attacks and bullies Alex. The two boys are forced to spend time together when their moms, who are friends, decide they could each use a friend.

Let's start with the characters before moving into a traditional review. Alex has OCD, but he is not on any medication or seeing a therapist with any regularity. His parents worry about the expense of a therapist, which is understandable, but Alex's OCD is problematic, causing him to be frequently late for school and damaging his hands and his school supplies from multiple washings. It also appears that his teachers are indifferent or ignorant of his condition.

Dan is set up as a secondary protagonist, and the reader is supposed to sympathize with him because his older brother is in juvenile detention for stealing a car and robbing a store. Dan bullies Alex because Dan hangs out with bullies at school, bullies who aren't really friends to him, either. While Dan is a fully fleshed-out character in this story, the other bullies - the Georges and Sophia - are just random evil flat characters.

The whole point of this book is clearly to make a person feel empathy for a bully and to understand that bullies have back stories and things going on in their lives that cause them to bully. However, the worst of the lot - Sophia - is not given a story. All we ever see her do is instigate trouble with Dan, with Alex, and with others.

All in all, this is an easy enough story to read, although I think that since Alex's OCD was diagnosed it would have been more realistic for him to have some more support for it, and the story's very didactic feel may turn off the very readers it was intended for. The two main characters are well-rounded, but all of the rest fade into the background, which only adds to the didactic feel of this story.

Recommended for: middle grade
Red Flags: lots of bullying - Alex has his head stuck in a toilet, for example, which is horrifying for a neurotypical person but traumatic for a person with OCD
Overall Rating: 3/5 stars

Read Instead: You Go First, The Losers Club, Absolutely Almost

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.