Boy vs Reality – at a glance
The School Reading Lists’ five word review: Family, influencers, rivalry, feelings, perfection.
Children’s book title: Boy vs Reality.
Children’s author: James Fox.
Children’s illustrator: Tika and Tata Bobokhidze.
Genre: Children’s fiction.
Published by: Scholastic.
ISBN: 9780702333118.
Recommended for children aged: 9-12.
First published: Paperback February 2026.
This children’s book is ideal for: Reading as a class before discussing the positives and negatives of posting online, not just personally but also when family members or friends are enthusiastic vloggers or bloggers. The importance of discussing how other people’s actions can make you feel could also be a topic made easier to approach once this book has been completed.
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Our review:
Ethan Lacey doesn’t have a normal home life and it’s not similar to anyone else he knows. His whole life, including his actual birth, has been filmed and uploaded onto the family vlog Meet The Laceys before being splashed across various other sites too numerous to mention. Now in Year 5, Ethan finds school very stressful but at least his best friends Arlo and Omar aren’t at all bothered by his online life, they just enjoy his company. His big brother, Mason, is in Year 8 and although they used to get on,
Ethan now says he hates his brother because he is a bully. Having just started his own vlog, MasonMayhem, his main focus seems to be humiliating Ethan and so far he is definitely succeeding.
Ethan isn’t sure life can get any worse until their parents tell the boys they’re getting divorced but, as Meet The Laceys is their sole form of income, no one is to tell anyone what’s happening behind closed doors. Mason is furious! He’s about to become a huge media star and can’t believe what his parents are doing to him while Ethan, who is scared and anxious almost all the time, is worried about lying and everyone getting into trouble.
As things get worse and worse, Ethan relies on his friends and Fidget, his anxiety monster, to help him understand things. He’s tried talking to his mum and dad but there’s always something to be filmed, edited, or promoted, and no one has any time for him. Eventually, after Mason’s worst post ever, he decides the only thing to do is leave home. When he then discovers something even worse has happened and, scarily, the police are involved, Ethan is sure he’s going to spend his life in jail but as, finally, they begin to work together he hopes that maybe they can become a little more of a ‘normal’ family after all.
Our verdict:
Ethan Lacey is the kind of main protagonist you can root for right from the start. Anxious, and an expert in catastrophising, he sees everything with a glass half empty mindset and has an anxiety monster called Fidget who he keeps in his pocket. Fidget has a big empty tummy where Ethan can put his worries so they don’t become sticky thoughts, which are the kind that stay in your mind and get bigger and bigger and way more fatalistic than they should.
Whilst having no choice about being filmed every day for the family vlog and being bullied relentlessly by his brother, Ethan tries to distance himself from everything whenever he can. He visits his grandad at his care home once a week but is the only one who does. His grandad has dementia and doesn’t always remember who he is but that doesn’t matter, Ethan is just happy to help out.
As things reach a crescendo, Ethan is dealing with his mum and dad arguing all the time, Mason’s bullying behaviour, and the humiliation he feels whenever his brother puts up a new post. Finding out about Mason’s life has changed some things a little, he is being bullied in school and then coming home and taking all his frustrations out on Ethan. When he steals Fidget and makes him the star of his latest vlog, Ethan decides he can’t live that way any longer and runs away, ending up at his grandad’s care home but the place is in uproar. Grandad has also run away and no one has any idea where he might be!
Even though Dad has been sleeping in the spare room he is still filming the family and uploading content every day, as he is absolutely determined to persuade their million subscribers that everything is fine. Things are rapidly running out of control however and neither parent has time to spend with the boys! There is also the threat on one of the fan pages from a frequent poster who seems to know everything that is really going on and has no hesitation in spreading it over popular forums to discredit the Laceys.
By the end of Boy vs Reality, everything has come to a head, after Ethan posts his own bombshell vlog entry, and the family are finally trying to create a new normal together. Ethan and Mason have reached an understanding of each other’s situation, Dad has moved out and Grandad has moved in. The fan intent on discrediting the family has been identified and, most important of all for Ethan, the Meet The Laceys vlog has been deleted. The four of them are having counselling and even Ethan feels hopeful about the future, most of the time!
Teaching points and book club discussion ideas:
- Ethan is very good at internalising his worries. Do you think his parents would have realised this if they hadn’t been so intent on making a living online?
- How exciting do you think it would be to receive gifts through the post just for filming an unboxing video and leaving a positive review? If this was happening to you what would you want to receive?
- Meal-prep Mondays happened every week and was very popular, but also got negative comments. Do you think Ethan’s mum and dad were right to stop their boys from looking at these?
- Of the two parents who was the most committed to posting every day? How was the Meet The Laceys site different to MasonMayhem?
- Is the cruelty of Mason’s posts about Ethan common online? If so what can be done to stop it? Do the lies mum and dad were happy to tell have any bearing on his site and posts about Ethan?
- Ethan’s anxiety monster helped him keep his sticky thoughts in check. Why do you think writing his worries down and feeding them to Fidget helped him get through his day?
- Each chapter has a picture at the start. Did these help you picture Ethan and everyone else who was illustrated or did you have an image of them in your mind anyway?
- Ethan took a big risk posting his exposé online. How do you think his feelings changed as he realised how angry everyone was? Would they have changed again when Grandad went missing, when he was found and after the family vlog was shut down?
Many thanks to Scholastic for the review copy.
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